Re Imaging Motherhood Shifting Conceptions of Maternal Embodiment in Select Wrintings Across The Waves of Feminism with a Specific Look at Margaret Atwood and Elena Ferrante

Abstract

ABSTRACT newlineIn feminist research and public debate, motherhood remains a complicated and contentious newlinesubject. The last forty years have seen a proliferation of writings that address motherhood and newlinemothering, and these writings have been published across disciplines. The concept of the newlinemother is especially relevant today when family structures, changing demographics and the newlinerapid hybridization of identities push accepted realities beyond the ordinary. Not every newlinepregnant body develops into a mother s body, and not every mother was once pregnant. newlineAdoptive parenthood, reproductive technologies, and transgender people all complicate newlinecurrent conceptions of motherhood, and miscarriage, abortion, and stillbirth continue to cut newlineshort pregnancy in a variety of ways. This thesis examines the experience of motherhood and newlinewill look at how different writers and cultures respond to it. Identity, embodiment, agency newlineand power are some of the issues that the scholar has looked at. This analysis of newlinerepresentative literary works will be done in dialogue with the waves of feminism. The newlinetwentieth century marks a radical shift: while the first and second waves newlinerepudiated motherhood as a barrier to women s self-actualization, the third wave asserts the newlineright to joy in motherhood. This doctoral thesis tracks this development in selected literary newlineworks of Margaret Atwood and Elena Ferrante. A close textual reading of selected works of newlineboth these authors has also been accompanied by a reader-response experiment to take into newlineaccount the reader as an element that adds to the meaning- making and interpretative nature of newlinenarratives. newlineKeywords: Feminism, motherhood, Atwood, Ferrante, agency, self-actualization newline