Breastfeeding in American Womens Literature

By cataloguing scenes in which characters breastfeed across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, this book studies the beliefs, fantasies, and concerns betrayed by their writers, and it charts the many consistent and competing cultural ideologies that accrue over the years and find expression in breastfeeding scenes

Rather than rarities, literary depictions of women breastfeeding infants are more common in American literature than recognized. In some cases, readers have dismissed such portrayals as scenic background or strokes of verisimilitude. In other cases, we have failed to register them at all. By cataloging and closely reading scenes of characters breastfeeding across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, this book decodes the beliefs of writers as celebrated as Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich and as current as Camille Dungy, Maggie Nelson, and Torrey Peters. It traces in these authors' fantasies and fears the consistent and sometimes competing cultural ideologies that accrue over decades and find expression in breastfeeding scenes. Despite the different historical and cultural expectations of what a mother should be and do, twentieth and twenty-first-century women writers have consistently singled out maternal pleasure-a mother's privileging of her own desire-as the most important theme attending scenes of breastfeeding.

Autorentext

Wendy Whelan-Stewart is Associate Professor of English and the coordinator of the English Master of Arts Program at McNeese State University. She received her doctorate in American Literature, with a minor in Feminist Theory and Women's Studies, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She teaches American literature and focuses her research on contemporary North American women writers.

Inhalt

Introduction

1. Caroline Kirkland's Pioneer Women and the Busy Breast

2. Breastfeeding as Good Husbandry in Willa Cather's Fiction

3. Women's Utopias and the Problem of Breastfeeding

4. The Passions of Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich's Breastfeeding Mothers

5. Nursing an Eco-Maternal Ethics: Maggie Nelson and Camille Dungy

Conclusion

Work Cited

Index