Deconstructing Motherhood Ideals and Developing Maternal Empowerment in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other

Abstract

[eng] This dissertation delves into the idealisation of motherhood presented in Girl, Woman, Other (2019), by Bernardine Evaristo. I study how motherhood is produced in Evaristo’s book, and how she deconstructs the patriarchal representations and archetypes both found in Black and white motherhood. I examine how motherhood can become empowering by exploring which features of Black motherhood are idealized, which mothers are presented as fulfilling such an idealisation, and which are not. For this, emphasis is placed on Motherhood Studies from a Black British point of view (Hill 2002) and on Evaristo’s work as Black British Literature (Stein 2004). The focus is then on those characters that are mothers. These characters are divided into two sections: Black Motherhood and White Motherhood. In the first section, there is an examination of maternal empowerment, motherhood, and its idealisation. The second section’s aim is to scrutinize the Black motherhood ideals, and on how Evaristo deconstructs such ideals. Although the third section discusses the idealisation of white motherhood, it also compares the dichotomy of Black and white motherhood, and whether the white one is empowered and constructed similarly to the Black motherhood. Finally, it concludes by determining how Evaristo empowers her characters and by identifying the idealisation of motherhood created by patriarchy.