Article Summary by Kate Schnur

This article explores the representations of different experiences of “unmotherhood” are represented in literature of the twentieth century. As this special issue explores the conditions of modernity that shape maternity, I ask how are the conditions of living outside of motherhood similarly shaped by those same conditions? I look to four novels representative of four forms of unmotherhood: Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed depicts a somewhat voluntary abortion; H.D.’s Asphodel and Bid Me to Live are fictional representations of the author’s own stillbirth; Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight depicts a woman’s life in the wake of her newborn son’s death, and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand  is a narrative dependent on the protagonist’s refusal to marry because of her equation of marriage with conception. Each of these novels also depicts a different relationship to fields of medicine ranging from hospital treatment to treatment in less professionalized medical spaces like nursing homes and midwives’ homes, to dinner parties where vague references are made to the use of birth control. These forms of unmotherhood are often studied independently, but rarely together as they are the products of different experiences of the body, agency, social pressure, and state control. Reading these narratives together affords us the opportunity to consider what “unmotherhood” means as a constructed state in and of itself, beyond the presumed negative, passive state of the “not” or the “not yet.” My analysis offers three gestures toward considering a definition of “unmotherhood” in the context of twentieth-century modernity: 1. It is a state that can be as defined by medical knowledges, spaces, tools and actors as is motherhood, 2. It is often figured in terms of distinctive “modern” phenomena (including the rise of Leftist politics, literary and artistic innovation, World War I, interwar urban development and poverty, and the politics of racial uplift), and 3. It is a state dynamically shaped through relationships between intimate partners and family members. In these three ways, my analysis of the selected novels defines unmotherhood as a permanent, transient, chosen, enforced, and—contradictory as it all may be—a legible and definable experience.

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Kate Schnur is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Queens College, the City University of New York, where she teaches classes in literature, composition, and women’s studies. Her research explores how sexualized and reproductive bodies act as sites of medical and literary knowledge production in the early twentieth century, particularly in modernist literature.