EBOOK
About
A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world's iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart.
Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl's Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice.
Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.
Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl's Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice.
Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"A sort of Rosetta Stone for the moment that examines the particular mix of fascination and dread that mothers engender . . . Rose is a calm and stylish writer whose rangy essays . . . have become indispensable reading during the current reckoning around power and sexuality."
Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"Rose is, as ever, devastating in her elegance and striking in her ingenuity . . . Running throughout the book is the conviction that, in matters of both self and state, the boundaries between inside and outside are violent and blurred"
a riddle for which mothers are the impossible key."