No Room of Her Own: Struggling Mothers in 21st Century Fiction

Abstract

This thesis explores struggling mothers in three 21st century works of fiction. Studying Lionel Shriver’s novel 'We Need to Talk About Kevin', Emma Donoghue’s novel 'Room' and Jennifer Kent’s film 'The Babadook', I argue that the women in these works feel bound by the mother role because they lack space in their relation to their son. Through close reading of the texts I show how this lack of space manifests itself both physically and mentally. Further, I connect these spatial metaphors to the concepts of space and femininity as they are used in Virginia Woolf’s 'A Room of One's Own'. I establish how our understanding of what is feminine and masculine has bearing on our understanding of what it means to be a good mother. Drawing on Woolf’s idea of androgyny as basis for intellectual freedom, I argue that the mothers, in order to be able to break out of the restrictions of motherhood, must enter an androgynous space in motherhood by rejecting the idea of the feminine. Using Julia Kristeva’s theory on the abject I show how the mothers, by breaking taboos and becoming unmotherly, themselves become abject and that only after they have faced the abject within themselves are they able to return as a redefined mother, free from the expectations set by society.