Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and MelodramaFrom novels of the nineteenth 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 The Handmaid's Tale, as well as in journalism and popular manuals on motherhood. Kaplan's analysis identifies two dominant paradigms of the mother as `Angel' and `Witch', and charts the contesting and often contradictory discourses of the mother in present-day America. |
From inside the book
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... on the many kinds of mother-topics that need exploring, especially in relation to minority and gay/lesbian discourses, it will have achieved a main aim. New York, 5 July 1991 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have many people to thank for making possible.
... exploring is not accidentally a “master” discourse: its patriarchal aspects are precisely what I want to unravel. But ... explore the ramifications of what is a prevailing cultural discourse (in the period of study) of the Ideal “angel ...
... explore here and offer as “evidence” of myths being at work in the culture at any given time. My premiss is that ... explored in the book's conclusion by examining both popular and feminist materials. The book aims here to contribute to ...
... explored in more detail in later chapters. Indeed, it is precisely the intervention of religious authorities in matters of child-rearing that kept alive the self-sacrificing “angel” mother, and traces of Rousseau's discourse long after ...
... explore in this book's concluding chapter. In the 1980s, we find a plethora of discourses in which the mother now ... explored. As already noted, it is also in the context of mother-as-(new) subject that cultural discourses begin to ...
Contents
WOMENS WRITING MELODRAMA AND FILM | |
THE SACRIFICE PARADIGM Ellen Woods | |
THE PHALLIC MOTHER PARADIGM | |
THE RESISTING MATERNAL WOMANS FILM 193060 Arzners | |
Consumerism science | |
Notes | |
Bibliography | |
Names index | |
Other editions - View all
Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama E. Ann Kaplan Limited preview - 2013 |
Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama E. Ann Kaplan No preview available - 1992 |