Roots of continuity or casualities of change? Mothers in twentieth-century southern women's fiction (Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Harriette Simpson Arnow, Zora Neale Hurston, Bobbie Ann Mason).

摘要

Twentieth century southern literature written by women appears to orbit around maternal characters precisely because mothers constitute the center of families in southern fiction—their marriages and births connect the generations, and their memories and actions drive the plots. Southern women writers have explored how these family connections have unraveled in response to the pressures of technological and economic change and the increasing influence of liberal individualism on the traditional hierarchies of southern life. These writers ask: As the bonds that tie southern women to family and community fray, are southern mothers freed, or are they abandoned? Does the modern world offer them, and by extension their families and communities, a net gain or loss?; Four women writers' depictions of women's lives as mothers in the rapidly changing rural south of the twentieth century deserve attention for their extended consideration of such questions. Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Harriette Simpson Arnow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Bobbie Ann Mason consistently engaged the challenges the twentieth century has posed for the South, notably in its relation to the rest of the country and its understanding of its own history. These authors also considered how family and community in the rural South have changed. Each novelist chose women characters as her primary means to examine southern life, and these characters, especially in their roles as mothers or their consideration of motherhood, offered examples of the influence modernism and modernization have had on southern family life and the links between families and communities.; Roberts, Arnow, Hurston, and Mason offer a rich and varied examination of motherhood, not as a trap to be avoided at all costs, but as a source of personal growth and renewal for women, and as a foundation for the connections, however tenuous, that define family and community in a rapidly changing world. These authors' novels provide evidence of southern literature's enduring fascination with the legitimate claims made by place, history, and family on human life. They provide a source for a new feminist theory that recognizes motherhood as a path toward selfhood through connection rather than individuation.