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COLT 360 - Gender and Identity in Literature

CRN: 31606

Instructor: Bess Myers

Term: Spring 2018

Monstrous Mothers

Poet Adrienne Rich begins her book “Of Mother Born” with an excerpt from her own journal, in which she admits, “My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.” Through reading, analysis, and discussion of various kinds of texts, including historical writing, poetry, and film, we will discover and develop contexts for a crucial trope, “mother as monster.” We will examine the social and ideological contexts in which this notion becomes fixed as a mainstay in Western cultures from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the modern, twentieth-century societies in which written texts and films in the horror genre repeat and elaborate it. In some works, mothers are literally monsters, such as the xenomorph queen in “Alien,” while in others, mothers become monstrous by means of their actions, such as Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ “Oresteia.” As we read and view our primary texts, we will investigate the anxieties about mothers and motherhood that surface in these works, and we will interrogate the fears about women’s bodies they seem to figure.

Satisfies General Education Requirements:

  • Group-Satisfying: Arts and Letters
  • Multicultural Courses: Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance (IP)