Introduction: Maternal Literatures in Text and Tradition: Daughter-Centric, Matrilineal, and Matrifocal Perspectives

[para. 1]: "In her introduction to The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989), Marianne Hirsch queries why, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the voice of Jocasta, Oedipus’s mother, is missing, and she connects this narrative silence to a larger literary lacunae: “in asking where the story of Jocasta is in the story of Oedipus, I am asking not only where the stories of women are in men’s plots, but where the stories of mothers are in the plots of sons and daughters” (4). She concludes that in order “to know Jocasta’s maternal story … we would have to begin with the mother” (5). Textual Mothers / Maternal Texts begins with the mother, foregrounding how she is represented in diverse literary traditions. Our collection focuses on mother subjects and mother writers, on women who produce auto/biography, fiction, and poetry about mothering, motherhood, and being mothered, who thus engage in the process or act of textual mothering and who produce what we call, in the broadest terms, maternal texts. Textual Mothers / Maternal Texts examines how authors use textual spaces to accept, embrace, negotiate, reconcile, resist, and challenge traditional conceptions of mothering and maternal roles, and how they offer alternative practices and visions for mothers in the present and future. In considering, further, the connections between a text and life itself, the collection examines how textual representations reflect and help to define or (re)shape the realities of women and families, and how mothering and being a mother are political, personal, and creative narratives unfolding within both the pages of a book and the spaces of a life. It illuminates how the authors and their respective protagonists “read” their own maternal identities as well as the maternal scripts of their families, cultures, and nations in their quest for self-knowledge, understanding, agency, and artistic expression."