Heroine Suppression Vol. 60
Roseanne Gennett
Jane Donawerth, perhaps following a similar train of thought, recently discussed fifteen feminist dystopias of the '90s where mothers are "dead, lost, or hostile" (51). (1) My own subsequent reading--including 31 science fiction novels written by women since 1990--confirmed her observations: recent works predominantly suppress or demonize mothers, and at times completely transform or displace maternal function. (2) Still, suppression of the mother in women's literature is nothing new. Elaine Showalter, for example, traces a literary tradition from the nineteenth century where in novels such as those by Jane Austen and the Brontes mothers are absent, trivialized, or dead. This drives the plot, as the protagonist is forced to find her own way through life. (3) Sheri Tepper follows this pattern in The Visitor, where the daughter protagonist must overcome the disappearance of her mother and the oppression of a wicked stepmother to find her true identity. Similarly, in Janine Ellen Young's The Bridge, the heroine's mother commits suicide just minutes after giving birth, leaving her infant to be raised by a former suitor. Another example is Nicola Griffith's Slow River, where the innocent daughter protagonist Lore is violently thrown into an underworld to struggle towards freedom. In the process she discovers that her powerful and aloof mother is a sexual predator. Why the resurgence of this mother/daughter antagonism, this demonization or trivialization of the mother, particularly when feminist science fiction had made a decided break from it in the utopias of the 1970s?
But although the cyborg refutes utopian insistence on connection with the earth, Farquhar and others are as intent on wrenching control of infants from patriarchically constructed mothers as were the utopians and Second Wave theorists. Yet utopian optimism has been replaced by dystopias and a return to the father for access to power. Mother's power stands rejected. The turn to fathers seeps into some Third Wave feminist discourse. Emerging with cyberfeminism in the '80s, the movement, rightly or wrongly, is often cast, sometimes self-cast, as a daughter movement to the Second Wave. Maternity receives less attention from the Third Wave than considerations of social justice and the pursuit of individual empowerment. But when young women are subject to the dynamics of primary female mothering, they may still need to draw on paternal access to power. Baumgardner and Richards explain that: "[We] have the support of our fathers in our quest to be free and ambitious." Dad makes decisions, is in more control, while mothers spend their time performing "fake homemaking jobs," have no time for their kids, experience poverty after divorce, and exhibit poor taste in men (206). This disillusioned equating of mothers with service and fathers with freedom is reflected in the renewed suppression and trivialization of mothers in contemporary women's science fiction.
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