The apotheosising of mothers in the collective consciousness of popular culture notwithstanding, a closer examination reveals their representation to be largely a passive figure in fiction. Assessing how these ideal mother figures are mediated in contemporary popular novels is a significant area of scholarship, as studies are sparse in this domain. My thesis focuses on the literary representations in narratives of mothering and motherhood, specifically in the context of revisionist popular novels based on the Mahabharata. It seeks to analyse the identity of the mother in relation to mother’s needs, concerns, emotions and experiences. Jasodhara Bagchi states that the idea of womanhood in the West was that of a wife but that of a mother in India (62). Ashis Nandy calls motherhood a ‘compensatory mechanism’ through which society can manipulate and control women (37). Maithreyi Krishnaraj argues that it is not mothering or motherhood that makes women vulnerable but their social construction, the meaning attached to the notion of motherhood and its implications for women. Given the tangled web of contradictory associations with the notion of motherhood, which can be a position of empowerment and simultaneously a site of patriarchal oppression, I try to investigate how mother figures are represented in contemporary popular novels. This research examines the constrictive patriarchal contexts to motherhood and illustrates the diverse ways through which it is reimagined with the possibility of an unconstrained maternal agency, subjectivity, and choice in revisionist writings. It further analyses how femininity negotiates patriarchy in these contemporary novels. In terms of methodology, I adopt a ‘matrifocal reading’ of popular revisionist fiction whereby the understanding of the text “attends to and accentuates the maternal thematic in any given text” (O’Reilly 17). Since the emphasis of the chosen texts is on the discourse of choice and empowerment, and as there is a shift from the narrative of victimhood towards characterisation of women with agency, my thesis will also employ a postfeminist theoretical framework in evaluating the popular texts to understand the extents to which the analytic approach of postfemininity is a productive entry into understanding contemporary negotiations of femininity with patriarchy.
References:
Bagchi, Jasodhara. Interrogating Motherhood. Sage, 2017.
Krishnaraj, Maithreyi. Motherhood in India: Glorification without Empowerment? Routledge, 2010, pp. 1-43.
Nandy, Ashis. "Woman versus Womanliness'." At the Edge of Psychology (1990): 32-46.
O'Reilly, Andrea. "Matricentric feminism: A feminism for mothers." Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (2019).