The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Maternal Ambivalence in Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25159/1753-5387/15783Keywords:
motherhood, mothering, maternal ambivalence, matrifocal reading, matrifocal narrativesAbstract
Scholars and philosophers of motherhood studies have continuously highlighted the contradictions in the dominant cultural ideologies of motherhood and the lived experiences of mothers. While the ideologies define the mother as selfless, unconditional, and unequivocal in her love for her children, the actual experience, psychological and sociocultural studies reveal, is often permeated with negative, violent, and conflicting emotions towards children, known as maternal ambivalence. In India, where the idealisation blatantly spills over to deification, voicing such feelings becomes sacrilegious. This paper attempts to study how the novel Burnt Sugar (2020) by Avni Doshi dares to speak the “unspeakable” and demonstrates maternal ambivalence as resulting from a combination of psychological, social, and cultural factors. The analysis looks at how the text negotiates the interspace between daughter-centricity and matrifocality in women’s writing by giving voice to ambivalences on both sides of the mother’s experience—of mothering and being mothered. Ultimately, this study investigates the manner in which these feelings, which are not acknowledged within cultural conceptions of the mother, result in ambivalence and trauma across generations.
Metrics
References
Almond, Barbara. 2010. The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood. 1st ed., University of California Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520947207
Chodorow, Nancy. 1999. The Reproduction of Mothering – Psychoanalysis & the Sociology of Gender. 2nd ed., University of California Press.
DiQuinzio, Patrice. 1999. The Impossibility of Motherhood: Feminism, Individualism and the Problem of Mothering (Thinking Gender). 1st ed. Routlege. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203820704
Doshi, Avni. Girl in White Cotton (Burnt Sugar). Fourth Estate India, 2020.
Jordan, Elaine. 1991. "Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy (eds.), Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities." University of Tennessee Press.
Maushart, Susan. The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Our Lives and Why We Never Talk About It. Penguin Books, 2000.
Mayo, Rosalind and Christina Moutsou. Editors. 2017. The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond. Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315715308
O'Reilly, Andrea. 2021. Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, Practice. The Demeter Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1k2j331
Palko, Abigail and Andrea O'Reilly. 2021. Monstrous Mothers: Troubling Tropes. Demeter Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1vbd22k
Parker, Rozsika. 2005. Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence. Virago.
Podneiks, Elizabeth and Andrea O'Reilly, editors. 2011. Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures. Wilfrid Laurier UP. DOI: https://doi.org/10.51644/9781554582921
Rich, Adrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 1st ed., W.W. Norton & Company
Ruddick, Sara. 1995. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. 2nd ed., Beacon Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Haritha Vijayakumaran, Dr. Marx
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Accepted 2024-05-09
Published 2024-06-25