The wise avenue
Abstract
My dissertation's creative portion is a short story cycle constructed around two organizing principles: a place and a protagonist group. The cycle's setting is Dundalk, Maryland, a predominately white, working-class suburb. My protagonist group is a matriarchal triad of grandmother, mother, and daughter. How these characters define and reflect both the institution of motherhood and the experience of mothering is of particular importance; therefore, my dissertation's critical introduction also focuses on maternal theory. This essay begins as a conversation with Jo Malin's text, The Voice of the Mother. Malin argues that -- via autobiography -- a dialogic conversation occurs between a daughter-writer and her biological mother. Disagreeing with Malin's thesis, I propose my own theoretical conceit, one inspired by work of Carolyn Heilbrun: what if, instead of a mother-daughter dyad, we look at nonfiction works via the lens of a triad, one composed of Daughter-Writer + Biological Mother + Literary Mother? By examining the potential dialogic triads found within three nonfiction works -- Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Louise DeSalvo's "The Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar," and Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby -- I conclude that when daughter-writers pair the ideologies learned from their mothers (ones often steeped in patriarchal motherhood) with those communicated by their "lit moms," the result seems to be not only a re-seeing of the biological mother but also a re-evaluation of who can mother and how this mothering can empower. In this way, my essay provides an example of how scholarship on motherhood can circumvent the gender essentialism that so often haunts writing about mothers.
Degree
Ph. D.