[Download] "Suppression and Transformation of the Maternal in Contemporary Women's Science Fiction." by Extrapolation # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Suppression and Transformation of the Maternal in Contemporary Women's Science Fiction.
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 193 KB
Description
Two years ago I was reading Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and Kathleen Ann Goonan's Queen City Jazz. For all the disjunction of time, place, and genre, they had an eerie resonance. Spenser populates Faerieland with monstrous mothers who are ultimately defeated by changelings and orphans such as Arthur and the Red Cross Knight. In Goonan's nanotech-enlivened Queen City, a monstrous mother periodically wipes out all the inhabitants. She is ultimately defeated by a young orphan woman and her synthesized clone daughter. Monstrous mothers have peopled mythologies, folk tales, and literatures from antiquity, but I wondered about this emergence in recent women's science fiction. After all, as author Suzy McKee Charnas notes, one of the attractions of science fiction is that authors do not have to "twist reality in order to create realistic free female characters, [but can] create the societies that will produce those characters" (Lefanu 158). Jane Donawerth, perhaps following a similar train of thought, recently discussed fifteen feminist dystopias of the '90s where mothers are "dead, lost, or hostile" (51). (1) My own subsequent reading--including 31 science fiction novels written by women since 1990--confirmed her observations: recent works predominantly suppress or demonize mothers, and at times completely transform or displace maternal function. (2) Still, suppression of the mother in women's literature is nothing new. Elaine Showalter, for example, traces a literary tradition from the nineteenth century where in novels such as those by Jane Austen and the Brontes mothers are absent, trivialized, or dead. This drives the plot, as the protagonist is forced to find her own way through life. (3) Sheri Tepper follows this pattern in The Visitor, where the daughter protagonist must overcome the disappearance of her mother and the oppression of a wicked stepmother to find her true identity. Similarly, in Janine Ellen Young's The Bridge, the heroine's mother commits suicide just minutes after giving birth, leaving her infant to be raised by a former suitor. Another example is Nicola Griffith's Slow River, where the innocent daughter protagonist Lore is violently thrown into an underworld to struggle towards freedom. In the process she discovers that her powerful and aloof mother is a sexual predator. Why the resurgence of this mother/daughter antagonism, this demonization or trivialization of the mother, particularly when feminist science fiction had made a decided break from it in the utopias of the 1970s?
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