Berit Åström

‘Sucking the Corrupte Mylke of an Infected Nurse’: regulating the dangerous maternal body

Drawing on medieval medical encyclopaedias, early modern and Victorian advice books, as well as twentieth scientific advice to mothers, and linking them to present-day mothering discourse in the media, this article discusses cultural attitudes towards breast-milk and nursing mothers. The texts present a paradox in that while breast-milk is claimed as the best food for an infant, and mothers who choose not to nurse are vilified, it is simultaneously discussed as a potential poison and corrupting agent. I argue that the fear of breast-milk is a symptom of a cultural anxiety that periodically resurfaces, constructing the maternal body as threat to the infant, a threat that must be controlled and contained.

Over Her Dismembered Body: The Crime Fiction of Mo Hayder and Jo Nesbø

Images of dismembered women can affect crime fiction readers in a number of ways: they may shock, enrage, disgust, or titillate them. In her novel Birdman, British author Mo Hayder presents a woman whose ‘scalp had been peeled from the skull … folded over so the hair and face hung like a wet rubber mask, inside out, covering the mouth and neck, pooling on the clavicle’ (2000: 24). In The Snowman, Norwegian author Jo Nesbo describes the body of a woman, so mutilated that it ‘was only thanks to a naked breast that they had been able to determine gender’ (2010: 54). Claims have been made that crime fiction is ramping up the violence towards female victims as a sales ploy (Hill 2009), yet I argue that in Nesbo and Hayder, the representation of violence is central to their attempt to examine critically society’s contempt for women and their bodies. In this chapter I demonstrate, through close readings of Mo Hayder’s Birdman and Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman, how these two authors not only resist the powerful trope of the eroticized female corpse, but also use images of violence and dismemberment to criticize the way society reduces women to their sexual and reproductive functions and destroys them when they are surplus to requirements.

The absent mother in the cultural imagination : missing, presumed dead

This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and deb ...

Marginalizing Motherhood: Postfeminist Fathers and Dead Mothers in Animated Film

It is a commonplace that very few mothers survive to the end of animated feature films. The construction of the families and fathers the mothers leave behind has changed over the last few decades, ...

A Narrative of Fear : Advice to Mothers

Taking present-day research into so-called new momism and intense mothering as a starting point, this article argues that the current mothering discourse, rather than articulating a new phenomenon, perpetuates a regulative discourse developed in the nineteenth century, in advice books written by medical doctors for pregnant women and new mothers. Both the Victorian and the present-day texts play on feelings of guilt and inadequacy in order to control the actions and emotions of mothers, although the threatened outcome differs: present-day mothers are warned that their children may become obese or develop neuropsychological disorders, whereas Victorian mothers are warned that their children might die.

Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond

With its powerful images of rape and revenge, Stieg Larssons bestselling Millennium trilogy has made a major impact on the contemporary crime novel. This collection explores the role that rape pla ...

Post-Feminist Fatherhood and the Marginalization of the Mother in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Abstract Critics have tended to dismiss feminist analyses of Cormac McCarthys works as misguided, labelling investigations of potential narrative misogyny in his novels as irrelevant. In this article, the author argues that such investigations are, on the contrary, highly relevant in the current climate of mother-blaming. The author specifically explains how McCarthy’s 2006 dystopian novel The Road uses post-feminist fatherhood to valorize the father and vilify the mother, thus participating in a continuing cultural trend of privileging fathers over mothers. The Road invokes traditional cultural expectations of motherhood and fatherhood, presenting the mother as unable and unwilling to care for the boy, in stark contrast to the very competent and able father. Many literary analyses of this highly acclaimed novel have unquestioningly accepted the post-feminist marginalization of the mother, and critics have elaborated on and developed the mother-blaming in the novel in a move that the author terms ‘critical co-writing’. Critical co-writing occurs when critics ally themselves with an author, rather than retaining a critical distance, and represent the authors ideas without problematizing them. In the case of The Road, many critics build on post-feminist cues in the novel, adding their own, unreflected, understandings of motherhood and fatherhood. In so doing, they reinterpret and rewrite the novel into an even more forceful presentation of flawed mothering. In a critical discussion of these readings, the author demonstrates how these critics transform the novels implicit criticism of the mother character into explicit condemnation.

Introduction—Explaining and Exploring the Dead or Absent Mother

This chapter addresses the question of why the dead/absent mother-trope is invoked in so many narratives and the many answers given, in mainstream conversations in various online media as well as in scholarly analyses. The chapter includes an overview of previous scholarly research, which is grouped according to the explanatory model given, rather than chronologically. Such an organization generates useful insights, not only into how scholars have approached the dead/absent mother-trope but also into the transhistorical character of the trope itself. The chapter is concluded with an overview of the other chapters in the anthology, showing how they demonstrate that the dead/absent mother-trope is a cultural conversation that transcends historical and generic divisions.

Referred pain: privileging male emotions in narrative instances of female physical suffering

This article analyses literary patterns of female subordination, and focuses in particular on what the author terms ‘referred pain’. By juxtaposing two early modern texts, William Shakespeares Titus Andronicus and Aphra Behns Oroonoko, with two modern visual texts, John Woos Mission: impossible 2 and Baz Luhrmans Moulin Rouge, the author discusses the recurring trope of privileging male emotional suffering over female physical suffering, and suggests that one reason for the continuing popularity of this can be sought in the kinship system and its exchange of women. The article argues for the application of a transhistorical perspective when studying literature, as a means of revealing patterns that may otherwise go unnoticed.