Reproductive Acts by Latimer Heather;

Author:Latimer, Heather;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

Mavis

Of all the Convent women, Mavis is the most obviously maternal in that she has had five children. Much like Sethe, the main character in Beloved, Mavis has killed some of her children, and her narrative often focuses on how she deals with her grief over their deaths. Unlike Sethe, Mavis does not kill her children intentionally, but by accident. Her baby twins, Merle and Pearl, suffocate in a hot car while Mavis grocery shops for her abusive husband’s dinner. Soon after their deaths Mavis begins to suspect that her husband, who brutalizes, rapes, and degrades her, is trying to enlist her other children in a plan to kill her. She therefore steals her husband’s car and runs away from her home in Maryland. At first she goes to her mother’s house, but when her mother phones her husband to tell on her, she “realizes that her own mother, like her older children, will conspire against her because of the strength of the social norm that children and women need to have a father and a husband.”65 She leaves her mother’s house and sets out alone for California. Along the way she runs out of gas and ends up at the Convent, where she stays for the rest of the novel, except for brief stints to spy on her children.

All of the Convent women’s stories involve violence and desertion of some type – Consolata was raped as a child, Gigi is traumatized by witnessing the brutal death of a boy at a Black Panther demonstration, Seneca has been sexually abused, and Pallas is pregnant, possibly from a gang-rape. Mavis’s story, however, is especially disturbing because, like Barbe’s story, it involves the taboo of infanticide and, also like Barbe’s story, shows us a mother who feels sadness without guilt about her actions. When reporters come to Mavis’s house to interview her after Merle’s and Pearl’s deaths, for instance, she refuses to accept a journalist’s falsely sympathetic statement, “this must be terrible for you,” by replying “Yes, m’am. It’s terrible for all of us.” Implicating her abusive husband and dysfunctional family in the twin’s deaths, Mavis refuses sole responsibility for a situation that would be easy to write off as a case of motherly neglect. When the journalist pushes Mavis to admit she acted wrongly, and that she must have been in the grocery store for longer than she remembers, Mavis refuses these implications: “I wasn’t expecting no danger.”66 Keeping to herself that the real danger for her, and her children, lies with her husband, Mavis is unable to explain to the reporter what the consequences might have been for her had she not gone to the grocery store that day or had she not taken the twins with her and left them at home.

Bouson argues that, if at first Mavis appears only to be “a victimized woman with a shameful past,” we quickly learn that she is able to “transcend easy social formulations.”67 Able to hear the laughter and singing of

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