Great expectations | 12 April 2018

In a 1974 interview celebrating the quarter century since the publication of her classic The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir recalled a eureka moment in which she saw that ‘to change the value system of society was to destroy the concept of motherhood’. That ‘value system of society’ rested on what she saw as enforced maternity, whereby women — whether through physical, psychological or social pressure — were pressed into humiliating servitude, a world of narrowed horizons and debasing physical shame. A mother was ‘alienated in her body and her social dignity’ and, finally, complicit in propping up a violent, corrupt and tenacious system of patriarchy, as well as capitalism itself (though unlike many to follow, De Beauvoir didn’t think capitalism was unique in degrading and enslaving women).

Jacqueline Rose has followed De Beauvoir’s lead — though unlike the ‘mother’ of feminists she does not see motherhood as inherently limiting; rather as murderously misunderstood. Mothers is an analysis of this misunderstanding, and a kind of J’accuse of the world’s political, ethical and sexual cruelties, seen at their clearest, maintains Rose, in its symbolic and actual treatment of mothers.

The thing to know before reading anything by Rose, a celebrated essayist, literary critic and feminist, now based at Birkbeck, is that she’s an adherent of psycho-analysis. This means that her interpretation of the world is largely refracted through the (unverifiable) power of the unconscious rather than empirical evidence. Not that this has ever hampered her political confidence or ferocity on matters one might think would lie outside the purview of psycho-analysis. Quite the contrary: in The Question of Zion, for instance, her masterwork of consuming anti-Zionism, published in 2005, her anti-Israel convictions and psychoanalysis furiously egg each other on, leading her to liken the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.

Mothers’ psychoanalytically infused ‘argument’ is the idea that ‘motherhood is, in Western discourse, the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts, or what it means to be fully human’.