A Review of Andrea O’Reilly, Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004).
Andrea O’Reilly is a well-known and influential scholar within the multidisciplinary area of maternal research. The work of Toni Morrison and her portrayal of motherhood, mothers, and mothering is the focus of this book, which is essential reading for maternal scholars in all fields. O’Reilly has achieved this aim by the unusual method of exploring both Morrison’s fiction, and interviews she has given over the years, to establish Morrison’s stance on motherhood. Relying on comments in the interviews, O’ Reilly argues that Morrison sees African American mothering as empowering for African American mothers themselves, for their children, and for the community. She claims that Morrison’s standpoint on black motherhood is that it is a site of power. This standpoint results in a particular form of maternal practice that O’Reilly refers to as motherwork.
This particular maternal practice sets out to achieve four goals. The first goal is to protect (preserve) their children in every way. The second goal is to nurture their children and teach them how to protect themselves. The third goal is to acculturate African American children into African American culture so that they grow up with ‘knowledge about and pride in their African American heritage’. The fourth goal is healing of those people who have not been mothered in this way. O’Reilly argues that these African American maternal practices are essential to the survival of the African American population.
In other words, Morrison, building upon the African American maternal practices of nurturance as resistance and cultural bearing discussed above, argues that motherwork, through the tasks of preservation, nurturance, cultural bearing, and healing, is what makes survival and resistance possible for African American people. (29)
O’Reilly uses Sara Ruddick’s theory of maternal practice and maternal thinking — a theory particularly appropriate for exploring motherwork, and the many skills that mothers develop from thinking about their work practices as they carry them out (Ruddick 1989). Ruddick argues that three tasks are basic to motherwork — preservation of the life of the child, the nurturance and growth of that life, and the training of the child to fit into the socio-cultural context in which s/he will be a member. She insists that motherwork, which is complex, frequently ambiguous, and beyond the control of the mother, creates a distinctive discipline of maternal thought. Ruddick’s theory supports the first three goals that O’Reilly claims are evident in Morrison’s perception of motherhood in her interviews.
The need for preservation and nurturance is clearly evident in the mothering of children. However, O’Reilly argues that, in contrast to the dominant images of motherhood in western socio-cultural contexts, Morrison emphasises preservation, which is usually taken for granted in white western societies. Western countries put more emphasis on nurturance. As O’Reilly claims, the first objective of nurturance in Morrison’s motherhood theory is self-love in the child, because the child cannot love others until it has learned to love her/himself. This learning comes from the child’s first love relationship, which is usually with the mother. Self-love is a necessity because, as it is developed in motherwork, it gives the child a strong self-identity. Love also ‘is essential for the emotional well-being of children,’ both girls and boys (33).
O’Reilly further observes that for Morrison the third goal of motherwork, particularly, includes training children specifically in the beliefs and customs of traditional African American culture and the values of what Morrison refers to as ‘the ancient properties’ and ‘funk’, so that children grow up with a strong African American identity enabling them to deal with the patriarchal and racist society in which they are embedded. O’Reilly uses Lowinsky’s term, ‘motherline’, to refer to the ancient lore of women that has been discredited in patriarchal society (Lowinsky 1992). O’Reilly maintains that, for Morrison, it is through the motherline that children learn to live life by maintaining ‘the ancient properties ancestral memory.’ Without the knowledge and support that comes from the motherline, female authority and authenticity is lost, because a strong identity is particularly necessary for girls who will face sexism, racism and patriarchal behaviour in the social milieu. (Even for those mothers who do not usually have to deal with racism, I would argue that the loss of the motherline is likewise evident in patriarchal western culture, because women’s history and knowledge is largely ignored.)
O’Reilly states that in Morrison’s view of motherhood, a young woman has to learn to be a daughter before she can be a mother. A daughter, or son, who is not aware of the ‘ancient properties’ and ‘funk’ does not know how to nurture their own children. O’Reilly claims that African American mothers maintain their motherline through the practices associated with the ‘ancient properties’ and the ‘funk’:
More specifically, Morrison takes traditional conceptions of black womanhood – what Morrison terms “the ancient properties” – and traditional black values – what she calls the funk – and makes them central to her definition of motherhood as a site of power for black women. (20)
O’Reilly sees that Morrison recognises that contemporary young African American women live life in a different way compared with their ancestors, but she is adamant they can still live ‘modern lives according to the ancient properties of traditional black motherhood’ (22).
The fourth goal is to heal those children/adults who have not had the advantages of the type of mothering that will prepare them to cope with the racism and sexism that will inevitably impact upon their lives. Adults who have not received the nurturance and training in the ancient properties must be ‘mended’ by being re-mothered, and re-connected.
Because O’Reilly understands Morrison’s maternal standpoint as a ‘site of power’, and her model of motherhood as one concerning ‘the empowerment of children,’ she rightly claims that African American motherhood is a ‘political act with social and public’ outcomes (29). As O’Reilly shows, this representation of motherhood is vastly different from the representation of the ‘good’ mother in western society. The ideal ‘mother’ in the developed nations is the ‘sensitive’ mother who focuses on her child or children, and spends most of her time at home playing with, and responding to, her child. She usually only works part-time when her children are little, and often has difficulty keeping herself in the public world where, as a motherworker, her work is not validated. Moreover, in the white West, paid work and motherwork are seen to be in conflict, but from Morrison’s maternal standpoint, paid work and motherwork are both taken for granted. The challenge is to maintain the motherwork despite paid work, sexism, and racism, because it is motherwork that is of paramount importance in Morrison’s view; it is mothers who pass on the ‘ancient properties’ and ‘funk’ which strengthen identity ; it is mothers who empower children; it is mothers who teach children how to love themselves and others.
With an appropriate theory of motherhood formed from studying interviews with Morrison, O’Reilly explores all of Morrison’s fiction — although Love is only briefly explored in an epilogue. She argues that in Morrison’s books the four motherwork tasks of preservation, nurturance, cultural bearing and healing are all present, but the author concentrates on the outcomes when the cultural bearing and the ‘ancient properties’ have not been passed on. O’Reilly argues that the importance of motherwork is established by Morrison in her portrayal of what happens when motherwork cannot be carried out, when motherwork is disrupted and the motherline is broken or fractured by migration, slavery, racism, classism or poverty. Mothers are depicted as being angry and grief-stricken when they cannot do their motherwork, even as they continue to struggle to do their best for their children, resisting the culture of the powerful. The mothers exercise their agency as well as they can in their efforts to use any power they can claim. She likewise draws attention to how Morrison endeavours to show that reconnection may be established for adults.
However, Morrison does not have characters who demonstrate representations of cultural bearing that empower children. Once again, O’Reilly asserts that the suffering that children experience in the books underlines the effects of the absence of cultural bearing:
I suggest that the significance of cultural bearing for the well-being of children is conveyed by showing the suffering that occurs when cultural bearing does not take place and mothers lose and children do not acquire the ancient properties that would empower them. In other words, the need for cultural bearing is affirmed and confirmed in and through its absence, in particular through detailing the costs and consequences of motherline disconnections and fractures. (43)
I consider O’Reilly’s book essential reading for any scholar working in the academic area of maternal studies. Her command of the literature in this area is impressive but, more importantly, she has demonstrated her creative abilities in linking Morrison’s interviews with her fiction. There could be no better scholar than Ruddick to choose to draw theory from. She is an outstanding scholar in the field of maternal scholarship and her theory of motherwork is a legitimate framework to use to explore what mothers do. I appreciate the argument that it is possible to read properties by their absence.
Some scholars may be critical of O’Reilly’s recognition of the importance placed on motherwork in Morrison’s work. It is possible that some readers could interpret her reading of Morrison as encouraging mothers to be self-sacrificing. However, O’Reilly draws attention to Morrison’s depiction of Ruth in Song of Solomon. This young African American woman is motherless and has lost her ‘funkiness’ because she has been assimilated into the dominant culture by her father: ‘Ruth, in every way, performs the quiet, obedient, passive, motherhood role well’ (81). It is made clear that Ruth cannot be a strong, mature African American mother because she lacks connection to her motherline.
It is also clear that Morrison is critical of families that are too enmeshed, where ‘anaconda love’, over-protecting and disabling, is evident (33). O’Reilly draws attention to Morrison’s criticism of the inward-looking family when she asserts that Morrison calls upon her readers ‘to recognize, affirm, and celebrate the “me” …’ (39). If we do not love the self, if our value is such that it resides in being anxious about another, we no longer are an authentic self.
When we do not name or nurture our own authentic self, we lose
forget about, or put to sleep the person we are. (39)
O’Reilly acknowledges in her Preface that as a young mother, she ‘felt more at home in Morrison’s maternal world than that of Anglo-American feminist thought’ (x), because so much of the Anglo-American maternal scholarship was daughter-centric and examined mothering only as it was defined by patriarchal institutions. She also asserts that there is no other work as important and as difficult as motherwork and that she always recognised its political and social aspects. As a maternal scholar and the mother of three children, I can only agree with her claims.
Marie Porter completed her PhD thesis, ‘Transformative Power in Motherwork’ in 2006 at The University of Queensland, and currently teaches there the first academic course to be devoted to mothering, HUMN2001. She is President of the Australian Association for Research on Mothering, and has chaired the organizing committees of three international conferences in Australia on mothering.
References
Lowinsky, N. R. (1992). Stories from the Motherline. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.
Ruddick, S. (1989). Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press.
Storhoff, Gary. ""Anaconda Love": Parental Enmeshment in Toni Morrison’s ‘Song of Solomon.’" LookSmart 31 Summer, 1997, no. 2 (1997): 1-14.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_n2_v31/ai_20615231
Marie Porter, ‘Motherwork: Complex, Frequently Ambiguous and Beyond the Control of the Mother,’ A Review of Andrea O’Reilly, Toni Morrison and Motherhood.
A Review of Andrea O’Reilly, Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004).
Andrea O’Reilly is a well-known and influential scholar within the multidisciplinary area of maternal research. The work of Toni Morrison and her portrayal of motherhood, mothers, and mothering is the focus of this book, which is essential reading for maternal scholars in all fields. O’Reilly has achieved this aim by the unusual method of exploring both Morrison’s fiction, and interviews she has given over the years, to establish Morrison’s stance on motherhood. Relying on comments in the interviews, O’ Reilly argues that Morrison sees African American mothering as empowering for African American mothers themselves, for their children, and for the community. She claims that Morrison’s standpoint on black motherhood is that it is a site of power. This standpoint results in a particular form of maternal practice that O’Reilly refers to as motherwork.
This particular maternal practice sets out to achieve four goals. The first goal is to protect (preserve) their children in every way. The second goal is to nurture their children and teach them how to protect themselves. The third goal is to acculturate African American children into African American culture so that they grow up with ‘knowledge about and pride in their African American heritage’. The fourth goal is healing of those people who have not been mothered in this way. O’Reilly argues that these African American maternal practices are essential to the survival of the African American population.
In other words, Morrison, building upon the African American maternal practices of nurturance as resistance and cultural bearing discussed above, argues that motherwork, through the tasks of preservation, nurturance, cultural bearing, and healing, is what makes survival and resistance possible for African American people. (29)
O’Reilly uses Sara Ruddick’s theory of maternal practice and maternal thinking — a theory particularly appropriate for exploring motherwork, and the many skills that mothers develop from thinking about their work practices as they carry them out (Ruddick 1989). Ruddick argues that three tasks are basic to motherwork — preservation of the life of the child, the nurturance and growth of that life, and the training of the child to fit into the socio-cultural context in which s/he will be a member. She insists that motherwork, which is complex, frequently ambiguous, and beyond the control of the mother, creates a distinctive discipline of maternal thought. Ruddick’s theory supports the first three goals that O’Reilly claims are evident in Morrison’s perception of motherhood in her interviews.
The need for preservation and nurturance is clearly evident in the mothering of children. However, O’Reilly argues that, in contrast to the dominant images of motherhood in western socio-cultural contexts, Morrison emphasises preservation, which is usually taken for granted in white western societies. Western countries put more emphasis on nurturance. As O’Reilly claims, the first objective of nurturance in Morrison’s motherhood theory is self-love in the child, because the child cannot love others until it has learned to love her/himself. This learning comes from the child’s first love relationship, which is usually with the mother. Self-love is a necessity because, as it is developed in motherwork, it gives the child a strong self-identity. Love also ‘is essential for the emotional well-being of children,’ both girls and boys (33).
O’Reilly further observes that for Morrison the third goal of motherwork, particularly, includes training children specifically in the beliefs and customs of traditional African American culture and the values of what Morrison refers to as ‘the ancient properties’ and ‘funk’, so that children grow up with a strong African American identity enabling them to deal with the patriarchal and racist society in which they are embedded. O’Reilly uses Lowinsky’s term, ‘motherline’, to refer to the ancient lore of women that has been discredited in patriarchal society (Lowinsky 1992). O’Reilly maintains that, for Morrison, it is through the motherline that children learn to live life by maintaining ‘the ancient properties ancestral memory.’ Without the knowledge and support that comes from the motherline, female authority and authenticity is lost, because a strong identity is particularly necessary for girls who will face sexism, racism and patriarchal behaviour in the social milieu. (Even for those mothers who do not usually have to deal with racism, I would argue that the loss of the motherline is likewise evident in patriarchal western culture, because women’s history and knowledge is largely ignored.)
O’Reilly states that in Morrison’s view of motherhood, a young woman has to learn to be a daughter before she can be a mother. A daughter, or son, who is not aware of the ‘ancient properties’ and ‘funk’ does not know how to nurture their own children. O’Reilly claims that African American mothers maintain their motherline through the practices associated with the ‘ancient properties’ and the ‘funk’:
More specifically, Morrison takes traditional conceptions of black womanhood – what Morrison terms “the ancient properties” – and traditional black values – what she calls the funk – and makes them central to her definition of motherhood as a site of power for black women. (20)
O’Reilly sees that Morrison recognises that contemporary young African American women live life in a different way compared with their ancestors, but she is adamant they can still live ‘modern lives according to the ancient properties of traditional black motherhood’ (22).
The fourth goal is to heal those children/adults who have not had the advantages of the type of mothering that will prepare them to cope with the racism and sexism that will inevitably impact upon their lives. Adults who have not received the nurturance and training in the ancient properties must be ‘mended’ by being re-mothered, and re-connected.
Because O’Reilly understands Morrison’s maternal standpoint as a ‘site of power’, and her model of motherhood as one concerning ‘the empowerment of children,’ she rightly claims that African American motherhood is a ‘political act with social and public’ outcomes (29). As O’Reilly shows, this representation of motherhood is vastly different from the representation of the ‘good’ mother in western society. The ideal ‘mother’ in the developed nations is the ‘sensitive’ mother who focuses on her child or children, and spends most of her time at home playing with, and responding to, her child. She usually only works part-time when her children are little, and often has difficulty keeping herself in the public world where, as a motherworker, her work is not validated. Moreover, in the white West, paid work and motherwork are seen to be in conflict, but from Morrison’s maternal standpoint, paid work and motherwork are both taken for granted. The challenge is to maintain the motherwork despite paid work, sexism, and racism, because it is motherwork that is of paramount importance in Morrison’s view; it is mothers who pass on the ‘ancient properties’ and ‘funk’ which strengthen identity ; it is mothers who empower children; it is mothers who teach children how to love themselves and others.
With an appropriate theory of motherhood formed from studying interviews with Morrison, O’Reilly explores all of Morrison’s fiction — although Love is only briefly explored in an epilogue. She argues that in Morrison’s books the four motherwork tasks of preservation, nurturance, cultural bearing and healing are all present, but the author concentrates on the outcomes when the cultural bearing and the ‘ancient properties’ have not been passed on. O’Reilly argues that the importance of motherwork is established by Morrison in her portrayal of what happens when motherwork cannot be carried out, when motherwork is disrupted and the motherline is broken or fractured by migration, slavery, racism, classism or poverty. Mothers are depicted as being angry and grief-stricken when they cannot do their motherwork, even as they continue to struggle to do their best for their children, resisting the culture of the powerful. The mothers exercise their agency as well as they can in their efforts to use any power they can claim. She likewise draws attention to how Morrison endeavours to show that reconnection may be established for adults.
However, Morrison does not have characters who demonstrate representations of cultural bearing that empower children. Once again, O’Reilly asserts that the suffering that children experience in the books underlines the effects of the absence of cultural bearing:
I suggest that the significance of cultural bearing for the well-being of children is conveyed by showing the suffering that occurs when cultural bearing does not take place and mothers lose and children do not acquire the ancient properties that would empower them. In other words, the need for cultural bearing is affirmed and confirmed in and through its absence, in particular through detailing the costs and consequences of motherline disconnections and fractures. (43)
I consider O’Reilly’s book essential reading for any scholar working in the academic area of maternal studies. Her command of the literature in this area is impressive but, more importantly, she has demonstrated her creative abilities in linking Morrison’s interviews with her fiction. There could be no better scholar than Ruddick to choose to draw theory from. She is an outstanding scholar in the field of maternal scholarship and her theory of motherwork is a legitimate framework to use to explore what mothers do. I appreciate the argument that it is possible to read properties by their absence.
Some scholars may be critical of O’Reilly’s recognition of the importance placed on motherwork in Morrison’s work. It is possible that some readers could interpret her reading of Morrison as encouraging mothers to be self-sacrificing. However, O’Reilly draws attention to Morrison’s depiction of Ruth in Song of Solomon. This young African American woman is motherless and has lost her ‘funkiness’ because she has been assimilated into the dominant culture by her father: ‘Ruth, in every way, performs the quiet, obedient, passive, motherhood role well’ (81). It is made clear that Ruth cannot be a strong, mature African American mother because she lacks connection to her motherline.
It is also clear that Morrison is critical of families that are too enmeshed, where ‘anaconda love’, over-protecting and disabling, is evident (33). O’Reilly draws attention to Morrison’s criticism of the inward-looking family when she asserts that Morrison calls upon her readers ‘to recognize, affirm, and celebrate the “me” …’ (39). If we do not love the self, if our value is such that it resides in being anxious about another, we no longer are an authentic self.
When we do not name or nurture our own authentic self, we lose
forget about, or put to sleep the person we are. (39)
O’Reilly acknowledges in her Preface that as a young mother, she ‘felt more at home in Morrison’s maternal world than that of Anglo-American feminist thought’ (x), because so much of the Anglo-American maternal scholarship was daughter-centric and examined mothering only as it was defined by patriarchal institutions. She also asserts that there is no other work as important and as difficult as motherwork and that she always recognised its political and social aspects. As a maternal scholar and the mother of three children, I can only agree with her claims.
Marie Porter completed her PhD thesis, ‘Transformative Power in Motherwork’ in 2006 at The University of Queensland, and currently teaches there the first academic course to be devoted to mothering, HUMN2001. She is President of the Australian Association for Research on Mothering, and has chaired the organizing committees of three international conferences in Australia on mothering.
References
Lowinsky, N. R. (1992). Stories from the Motherline. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.
Ruddick, S. (1989). Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press.
Storhoff, Gary. ""Anaconda Love": Parental Enmeshment in Toni Morrison’s ‘Song of Solomon.’" LookSmart 31 Summer, 1997, no. 2 (1997): 1-14.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_n2_v31/ai_20615231