The Anatomy of Motherhood

By Prithvijit Sinha  

Motherhood can be an unholy trap. As I mature through my thirties and look at the world open up its cobwebs to reveal cavernous truths, the indices of female mortality rates during childbirth, women’s roles halting at the junction of child-rearing and a lack of control over their own bodies present a bleak societal landscape. In 2023, the way men continue to wield sexual autonomy, deciding in due course through no reasonable precedent to demand a male heir and assert their say in the institutional framework of ‘Family’, it’s obvious that there lies a stark road ahead where gender inequity remains the norm rather than the exception.

The overturning of a historical ROE V/S WADE in the USA and India’s positive ruling on abortion and in general reproductive rights in 2022 are two global perspectives. The unifying theme even in those polarized circumstances is the burden of guilt, shame and ingrained biases that prove it impossible for every woman to access equal healthcare or decide the best course for her physical longevity in the long run. In societies like ours where every confrontational flashpoint is flagged off by pulling curtains of silence over crucial legislations in a larger, seemingly democratic discourse, being a mother (or assuming the role of one even under scenarios beyond one’s control) can be emotionally exhausting, to say the least.

To offer an alternative, there are illustrations in popular culture from both within our national ethos and across the pond, to give us various scenarios inspired by the daily struggle for females that show us the flipside of feminism, advocacy and gynocriticism. Some spring from those revolutionary strains. All confront societal hegemony and cultural sanctions.

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In the classic television series Mad Men (2007-2015), Elisabeth Moss’ poignant characterisation of Peggy Olson, an advertising agency secretary, reaches a pivotal turning point with her unexpected pregnancy. It is a product of a consensual coupling springing from an attraction with an accounts executive Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser); Peggy goes through with the final trimester which is never shown in detail but culminates with her delivery of the baby in a nursing home. A young woman who refuses to jeopardize her future by taking on the role of a mother, she declines to look at the child when the nurse exhorts her to do that. The baby is adopted by her older sister as a future season reveals but she has nothing to do with her past or the momentary moment of indiscretion that is even used as a point of reference by her religious mother. The writing and performance are layered with complexity regarding that decision and nowhere is Peggy made to be a villain or given the short shrift owing to societal judgment. Her boss Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is the only one by her side in the hospital at the time of her delivery. His stoic wisdom, given to no moral posturing, and her own strength to decide for herself and, in turn, the best course for her baby instead of being a disdainful, unwilling and indifferent mother to a neglected child, actually sow the seeds of her evolution as a woman who would take over the reins as senior copywriter in a patriarchal subculture. Her confession to the father of the child, Pete, in the fourth season finale, is suitably poignant. It’s a cathartic moment and is rescued from the convention of a romantic union between the two.

In the same series, Betty Draper’s (January Jones) often complex interactions with her headstrong daughter Sally (Keirnan Shipka) pit her maternal core against her own reserved nature and undiagnosed state of alienation while Megan’s (Jessica Pare) notions of terminating her pregnancy are counteracted by her Catholic neighbour (Linda Cardellini); the latter is also a concerned mother of a teenage son who is aiming to save him from a customary drafting in Vietnam while the former has begun her fledgling career as an actress. All these attributes unfold in the tumultuous mid-century axis of 1960s America where the feminist movement and reproductive rights were being spearheaded, the era of counterculture accommodating personal and political crises. In the rich emotional landscape of the series that is period-specific, motherhood doesn’t become a trope; it is an extension of one’s personality, judgements kept away so that even if the era entraps these enterprising women in stereotypes, they counter domesticity as housewives, the only role otherwise assigned to their ilk.

Moss has become the flagbearer for portraying extreme dimensions of motherhood in other notable projects since Mad Men; The Handmaid’s Tale being an icebreaker as far as conservative faith-based doctrines and retrograde exploitation is concerned. As Offred/ June, her financial and personal agency is wiped out from the modern world to coerce her into a position of servitude in the dystopian colony of Gilead. She is denied direct eye contact, reading and writing along with hundreds of other womenfolk and is kept as an instrument of fertility, giving birth to babies for the elite families who have orchestrated this hellish alternate nation while pining for her own biological daughter Hannah who was taken from her during the USA’s transition to power. Based on the futuristic book by Margaret Atwood published in the 1980s, the series portrays a body-politic that is directly internalised in our own contemporary period where a post-Trump unravelling has ultimately led to Roe v/s Wade being overturned and racism, mass shootings and sexual assaults becoming order of the day.

Even in the acclaimed reiteration of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (2020), Moss battles physical abuse from her neo-rich billionaire partner first and then is entrapped by him when she is found pregnant with his baby. Psychology of violence and trauma intertwine with impending motherhood and male control on the unborn child’s identity as his technological prowess becomes another frontier to coerce her into submission. Her own agency is taken to be as good or bad as her unborn child’s mortality. Moss counters all these slings and arrows in both works to show a woman undaunted by her reproductive status and fighting against all odds to retain some semblance of rights to her body and mind.

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Going further, The Lost Daughter (2021) is an important extension for initiating discourses around mothers who know that the role, the status and the hallowed aura around it is not all sunshine and glory. What if the natural corollary of partnership and marriage with a male counterpart as well as the expected concept of procreation doesn’t lead to fulfilment solely on the basis of giving birth? Here, Leda (Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley in her younger form) puts forward an oft-maligned but nevertheless realistic aspect of motherhood where the diurnal routine could swallow an individual and not just because the woman is an academic genius. It’s much more complex. Perhaps, procreation and motherhood are not the only spaces that can fully engage her.

Not everyone is cut out to be a parent. A dilemma that one of India’s most sought-after performers Tisca Chopra has touched upon as an administrative officer in Dahan (2022), an authority figure grappling with a small-town’s superstitious fiats. But she’s truly haunted by her depressive pallor owing to her husband’s suicide and her own recollections of motherhood, one where her inability to look at her baby son has extended to the present-day, with the distance between them glaring, something the now-teenager desperately wants to bridge. In Taare Zameen Par (2007) too, she gave poignant credence to a former career-woman who struggles to empathise with her son’s learning disability but is full of unconditional love and concern for his well-being even as the skewed gender roles within home allows her husband to send off the ‘black sheep’ to a boarding school far away. Her consent or opinion is never sought in the matter; mother and son are united in grief and longing for each other. Likewise, in Qissa, she is a mute witness as the father raises the youngest daughter as a son and the mother is made to bear the weight of not birthing a male heir in a post-1947 Partition narrative.

All these examples have a distinctive stamp of social mores and what constitutes a woman’s and a mother’s stand within narrow lines, across spectrums.

Kate Winslet’s turn in Revolutionary Road (2008) is the most extreme, simultaneously curdled and thought-provoking. As a woman of post War suburbia, she is exhausted mentally from what the future holds for her: conformity and unfulfilled dreams. A failed actress, a wife and mother who dares to see beyond the picket fence and middle-class cocoon of the Baby Boom age, she somehow manages to get herself and her better half on the same page about their once-shared ideals of moving abroad and living in bliss rather than material extravagance.

Her death springing from a dangerously failed abortion that she contrives herself is actually a suicide, a rallying cry against her perceived status as just a mother. The story earns its poignancy because worldly strictures are ultimately responsible for killing her, her dreams, her individuality.

The fact that many of the cited works originate in literary sources (Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road & Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter) adds to the intertextuality of word and screen treatments.

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Going further into this complex but essential territory, the theme of motherhood in myriad forms takes in its encompassing vestibule more than the obsessively toxic, religious terror of Piper Laurie in Carrie, the beleaguered mothers, one adoptive, as in The Omen and another looking at the manifestation of evil in her pre-teen kid as in The Exorcist, or its sinister register echoing the fear of raising a child within a collapsing social order and post-partum depression in Rosemary’s Baby. Horror, hence, stands out as a genre that gives its female protagonists individual agency and not just as ostensible scream queens. In a work like Hereditary, Toni Colette’s matriarch, in a moment of rare honesty with her son, confesses about never wanting to be a mother in the first place or even settling into matrimony. She was forced into both roles by her difficult mother, who, it is revealed, eventually has set in motion a generational firework of grief, death and cult rituals that especially partakes perverse obliteration of the female body while lionising the male form.

In the period drama The Favourite (2018), Queen Anne’s predicament is made symbolic of a larger ethos as her almost dozen pregnancies, all of them culminating in still-born babies and pre-mature deaths, leaves her physically hollow. To produce a male heir, several women are sacrificed, their bodies obliterated, their health and well-being bulldozed by patriarchy. It happens to a queen, a supposedly powerful national figure who is a reproductive vestibule to her husband. So what chance does the common woman have at exhibiting agency?

Ashad Ka Ek Din, based on Mohan Rakesh’s classic stage drama, is an example where a playwright and poet’s beloved (Rekha Sabnis) is left to fend for herself when he leaves her hanging by a thread. Her baby born from another man, a teacher, also becomes her responsibility. Without a male member to look after both, she boldly proclaims, in a monologue addressed directly to the camera with pure earnestness, her intention to raise the infant as a single mother, now that she has been spurned by love’s fickle ways. That she has the initiative to do so in ancient India is indeed a bold move and a social commentary where single motherhood becomes part of a mainstream conversation. Taboos are broken in that singular mould.

Modern day popular culture is filled with examples of female agency; as single mothers or expecting ones, they take sound decisions about their body and the child’s better future. In them, she also defines herself without a societal glare or male interface in her choice.

Juno (2007) is a brave, beautiful work in that regard in which the titular high schooler chooses to carry her baby to term and give her up for adoption by a caring, financially strong couple who cannot conceive on their own. Her parents and best friend treat it as a life exigency that needs counsel, wit and unconditional support without pressures of morality to govern the discourse. You can see the young adult come into her own precisely because she is not ostracised by her loved ones even as judgements are unavoidable in a larger domain.

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In Mimi (2021), Kriti Sanon has a double dilemma. She is a surrogate mother who carries another couple’s baby in her womb for financial independence and dreams of making it as a performer. But when the couple refuses to agree to keep its word owing to a possible physical debility in the child in the near future, she is left rudderless. The film takes the approach of a dramedy to probe social taboos.

Mimi takes matters into her own hands after playing a game of hide and seek to evade judgements. But she eventually comes clean to her parents, is uniformly backed by her best friend and a male ally who is willing to shatter stereotypes to uphold her resolve, without any romantic subplot to muddy waters. Above all, her choice to keep the baby, raise him as a single mother and fight against the returning parents who want him back translates to an ultimately touching ode to mothers, with a premium on her love for her child without appendages of any other kind. The personal journey here is also reflective of socio-political issues pertaining to surrogacy, adoption and medical treatment in such delicate scenarios within India at large. It is an added incentive that Mimi belongs to a struggling middle-class so to make her mark is to evade every privilege that the moneyed one percent feels it deserves, even someone else’s womb.

Similarly, The Good Girl, a 2017 short film starring Gurdeep Kohli and Plabita Borthakur, is a beautifully realised journey of womanhood where a possible pregnancy for the young, promising daughter examines prejudices, judgements and the gender roles that stifle every generation. There are insights into the mother’s secondary role within home, pressures of near-perfection on children. The mould of conventionally handling this sensitive crisis is broken when the mother offers support to the daughter sans judgement. If a child bears expectations of being the very best version of herself then the parent must rise to the occasion to deal with it as an adult without raising a hue and cry. Motherhood here isn’t a stifling construct. An impending pregnancy and its possible termination then become issues to be addressed, not swept under the carpet.

On the musical front too, consummate artists like Tori Amos have addressed the private pain of suffering miscarriage in a song like “Spark”, while Madonna, ever the fearless trailblazer, has “Papa Don’t Preach” (1986) as a calling card for flouting the institutionalised conservatism of Catholic faith and disdain reserved for unwed mothers. Her iconic line from this song, “But I’ve made up my mind/ I’m keeping my baby/ I’m gonna keep my baby” constitutes a key cultural change where women begin to escape trappings of being the secondary, weaker sex to reclaim their bodies. It’s a statement that lingers like a gospel truth in the post Roe v Wade epoch.

To cap it off, Shuruat, an episode of the seminal ’90s anthology series Star Bestsellers, has a young Indian woman navigating divorce, depression not alone but with the utmost care and love showered on her by her mother-in-law and a female doctor. In the ending minutes, the delicate topic of abortion is accommodated but by this time, the lady has gained inner strength to overcome guilt and shame, spurred by the two experienced hands who have allowed her to evolve, decide for herself, her body and future. That it’s directed by a male director without any of the usual pandering or patronising tonality makes it totally effective in showing life, full of camaraderie, as it is despite the looming suppositions occasioned by crises as divorce or abortion. Here, womanhood and motherhood leave no stones unturned to transform into friendship, a sisterhood sustaining generations.

These are the positive tokens we must cling to in order to renew sacrosanct narratives relaying age-old tropes.

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In the 2020s itself, realistic depictions of maternal areas of conflict have become a mainstay, revealing a more open discourse around birth, mortality and the female body as site of exploitation and reproductive politics.

Eliza Hittman’s unforgettable Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) leads that charge, coming from a female who trains her spotlight on inequities that plague the youngest girl who is expecting a baby and seeks to terminate it. The teenager who seeks that risky procedure here without any parental support, in a city far away from home, is emblematic of the larger cultural ethics that is hell-bent on alienating her and others of her ilk, teenagers/ young adults who may have fallen prey to assault at school or the workplace and fear being subjected to scrutiny regarding their moral nature.

It is a work of profound compassion where the girl and her cousin are all alone and the mere idea of motherhood is a horror, given they are kids themselves and have mostly seen adults treat them as spare parts within the domestic sphere. Stark, unsparing but beautifully optimistic, it removes the spectacle of an abortion and the stigma of physical changes on the body by capturing reaction shots in long takes and mid-close ups, choosing the face as its canvas to convey ins and outs of a contentious issue. The work hits harder with the overturning of Roe v Wade as the procedure itself isn’t the safest in careless medical hands.

With Blonde, an icon such as Marilyn Monroe has been shown as a powerless dummy figure whose several abortions were orchestrated by the men who decided in her place. It’s a complex work by all accounts and portrays a horrifying childhood, mental health breakdown on the part of her mother and her own search for an elusive father figure reaching a whirlpool that keeps swaying her in destruction’s path. Her body and those who lay siege upon it, through assault, lack of consent, is a site where her identity rests in pieces, revisited throughout history to connect dots between then and now, in a continuum of unchanging mores.

That retrospective sense of urgency pervades the Game of Thrones prequel series House of The Dragon where women wield influence, power and sound bugles for statecraft within a patriarchal system in which lines of inheritance are strictly male-dominated. Its first episode puts the female body in a time-honoured mould when the queen, reeling already from middle-age and a difficult pregnancy, is made to deliver without much thought about her well-being and dies, giving birth to a stillborn ‘male heir’ everybody was desperately jostling for. Her pain, excruciating, and her fate, destined for death, is put on the screen with unflinching, graphic detail, the blood lost and the life gone giving us a visual, historical dossier of injustice against ‘mothers’.

In the end, writing a piece like this generates a rightful sense of rage, an indignation against forces that put women in a box and fail to consider the female body or identity as anything other than a nesting place for eventual motherhood, for inevitably nurturing a future generation. The irony will always be in how the ones giving life are almost always put last. Their bodies and minds obliterated. Their choices imputed.

Circa 2023, that still remains the dominant narrative.

Photo: IMDb: Still of Jessie Buckley, Ellie Mae Blake and Robyn Elwell in The Lost Daughter (2021)

Bio:
Prithvijeet Sinha is from Lucknow, India. He is a postgraduate with MPhil from the University of Lucknow, having launched his prolific writing career by self-publishing on the worldwide community Wattpad since 2015 and on his WordPress blog, An Awadh Boy’s Panorama. His works have been published in varied publications. His life force resides in writing.

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