The Roots of Mama Rage: A Review of Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre

Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre

by Dara Rossman Regaignon

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

Buy Book

In Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre, Dara Rossman Regaignon digs into the question of maternal worry through examining the literary and rhetorical history of nineteenth-century genres: advice literature, fiction, life writing, and grief narratives. Regaignon argues that the concept of maternal care across this writing relies heavily on maternal anxiety, a state that persists to this day in Western, middle-class motherhood. This book is written from an academic standpoint, but mamas who have been devouring creative writing by mothers about anxiety, rage, and the pressures of parenting will find much to connect with here, including a clearer understanding of the roots of this familiar feeling. The genres examined in this book, Regaignon observes, work together “to make the emotion of anxiety sticky to the scene of childcare” and “not-entirely-separable from the scene of maternal love.” One cannot inhabit love as a mother, in other words, unless one embraces the implicitly woven social culture of worry about children.

Regaignon’s analysis, organized in standalone chapters that analyze examples from the aforementioned genres, demonstrates that middle-class mothers have been told how to be, what to value, and who (most certainly people outside of themselves) to trust. One result is that contemporary motherhood narratives tend to reflect and serve as an echo chamber for capitalist structures. Regaignon offers a convincing frame for understanding how women’s bodies have come to be medically and socially controlled in Western culture. She notes that “the anxious mother is overwhelmed not simply by too many choices and possibilities in the present but also by the future implications of each decision–including the very real possibility that her action will make no difference at all.” As a single mother reading this book, I was struck by the ways in which my choices about whether and how to be a mother are always and already under critique. I began to understand, as well, that my “anxiety” as a mother has been shaped by outer expectations that can feel impossible and that have, in many cases, not been created by mothers.

Many mamas will relate to the pressures of getting child-rearing right and even the poignancy of concern about getting children to the end of each day alive. Mamas will likely connect with the idea that parents are, as Regaignon puts it, “perpetually on the verge of deadly error.” That weight is a long-term and incredibly effective construction for mamas who have fretted over such things as early care, or the delivery method of their children, or how miniscule actions predict everything else to come.

To illustrate cultural anxiety about childhood death, Regaignon analyzes Charles Dickens’s 1840–1841 serial, The Old Curiosity Shop. She notes that the slow pacing of child Nell’s death allows Dickens to generate reader anticipation, feeding off the controversy surrounding any child character’s death. This type of anticipation, an editorial and sociocultural strategy for serial novels in the Victorian era, causes anxiety in the reader in a similar fashion as advice literature of that time period that was intended to ward off the threat of a child’s death. The anxiety fostered in advice literature, as Regaignon puts it, is “objectless,” meaning that mothers in a time period of high child mortality were suspended in a state of anticipation related to the “tragic probability” of death or injury in “a generalized context of precarity.” It’s not a huge leap to the current context of middle-class, privileged motherhood: the pressures of preventative testing and care, aisles of parenting books (with the sexiest titles focused on fed-up parents, reacting to mainstream approaches), and rigid categories– crunchy-granola, helicopter, soccer mom, etc.

From the Victorian era to today, the persistence of public statistics about health and death encourages a view of bodies as always in danger and at risk. The emotion many mothers feel about how their choices create or ward off danger is an impossible yet constant state in the face of this stress. Consider contemporary analogs to this sense of precarity: school shootings in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic, the patriarchal regulation of abortion and birth control, the moral panics surrounding gender and sexuality. Public conversations and “statistical stress” surrounding bodies and health enhance maternal anxiety. Additionally, contemporary advice literature, such as the popular What to Expect When You’re Expecting, works from the La Leche League, and other childhood development books, could, just as easily as Victorian era genres, systematically displace maternal knowledge and intuition to center social and medical perspectives. It’s striking how much even advocates of “natural” mothering (i.e., breast is best, birth at Ina May’s farm, etc.) play into this displacement by emphasizing the supposed error of doing otherwise, even when the “preferred” or “natural” method may not be not an option.

Regaignon’s rhetorical lens is a lesson in how maternal anxiety can seem inevitable but is perpetuated and made implicit by a longstanding history. Writing Maternity, then, is an effective reminder of how written genres shape our everyday interactions. Understanding how our lives as mothers are shaped by written genres and identifying deeply embedded cultural interactions and social mores are critical for perceiving alternatives and creating counter-stories. In our twenty years of publishing at Literary Mama, as Editor in Chief I wonder how our pieces have been unwittingly influenced by this embedded anxiety or which of our pieces have spoken back to it. Certainly, academic analyses such as Regaignon’s could inspire mama writers, editors, and journals to grow beyond the tropes of maternal anxiety. To what extent can mamahood writing, then, become (and continue to be) a force for troubling and disrupting our notions of what makes a mother, as well as the privileges and downfalls of middle-class motherhood?