Everyday World- Making: Toward an Understanding of Affect and Mothering by Lane Julia;

Author:Lane, Julia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Demeter Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Unforgivable or Outlaw Emotions?

The Heart of Maternal Darkness in Grazia Verasani’s From Medea

ALESSANDRO CASTELLINI

Marga, the.… low mark you got in love, let’s call it that way, is like mine. We’ve been both failed, that’s all. And now they force us [to pay] the toll of sorrow. To the world we are crazy. They never think that crazy is bringing a child into the world! And if we spend a day, a single day without thinking about it.… (Verasani 40-41)2

IS A MOTHER who kills her child still a mother? Or shall we rather assume, as many would have it, that her dramatic and violent gesture signals her incontestable renunciation of that role—that she has, as it were, given up her right to speak as a mother (and as a woman, some would add)? And how willing are we to confer cultural intelligibility to her affective experience, beyond the familiar and somewhat comforting narratives of the “bad” or “mad” mother?3 Widespread cultural representations of murderous mothers—as either cruel monsters or as mentally unstable, deranged individuals—strip these women of their humanity and make them into rare exceptions to an otherwise widely shared maternal ideal.4 Maternal violence and its perpetrators are cast to the fringe of cultural intelligibility, if not entirely outside of its carefully policed boundaries and into a realm of abjection, while the normative ideal of an all-giving, self-sacrificing maternal love untainted by negative emotions remains unquestioned.

To be sure, groundbreaking feminist classics—such as Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, Jane Lazarre’s The Mother Knot, and Ann Oakley’s Becoming a Mother—have engaged in unflinching interrogations of the lights and shadows of motherhood and have provided a much needed expansion of the vocabulary with which to conceive of maternal rage and aggression. Yet even though these works have contributed to the emergence in the last two decades of a more systematic (and sympathetic) exploration of maternal ambivalence,5 the negative side of that ambivalence has remained firmly entrenched in a cultural taboo that is difficult to erode. What is more, some of the most significant theoretical contributions to the underexplored territory of maternal violence are variously inscribed in the medicalized framework provided by psychoanalysis or (forensic) psychology, a fact that makes them suspect, to say the least.6 By recurrently associating maternal aggressive and murderous impulses with the onset of clinical depression or psychosis, the medical model underpinning such interventions rehashes a century-old narrative that purports to identify a causal relationship between pregnancy, childbirth, mental disorder, and a mother’s potential for violence (Meyer and Oberman 11). The not-so-implicit pathologization of women’s reproductive capacity that seems to inevitably accompany these accounts combines with an understanding of depression as the result of a dysfunctional personality, albeit often exacerbated by environmental factors. This labelling makes it difficult to discuss maternal violence in anything but individualistic terms and forecloses the capacity to accept murderous mothers as reliable narrators of their emotional landscapes.

In this respect, the following pages are intended as a provocation but also as a much needed intervention toward conceiving

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