Publisher's Synopsis
From novels of the 19th century to films of the 1990s, American culture abounds with images of white, middle-class mothers. In "Motherhood and Representation", E. Ann Kaplan considers how the mother appears in three related spheres: the historical, in which she charts changing representations of the mother from 1830 to the postmodernist present; the psychoanalytic, which discusses theories of the mother from Freud to Lacan and the French Feminists; and the mother as she is figured in cultural representations: in literary and film texts such as "East Lynne", "Marnie" and "The Handmaid's Tale". Kaplan's analysis identifies two dominant Western paradigms of the mother as "angel" and "witch", evident in 19th century women's writing and 20th century "women's film". Charting the contesting and often contradictory discourses of the mother in present-day America, she argues that modern reproductive technologies have created dramatic changes in the representation of the mother figure.;This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics of gender and women's studies, film studies and cultural studies.
