Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 23

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This line of thought is one that I often encounter in Alice Munro’s short stories.
Her mothers are not inherently pulled towards motherhood but seem to fall into it
by default. Munro’s stories are full of a sentiment that mothers should feel fulfilled
by their maternal state. This is a social expectation that is never clearly spelled out
but is still omnipresent. Her mothers struggle against an invisible force; their
children become adversaries but the adversity is wrongly attributed. Julia Kristeva
defines “maternal aversion” as a “hatred without recipient”.3 The social
expectation of maternal fulfilment is the true enemy of these women, who feel the
need for something else but find themselves chained to another human being.
The maternal body is used in Munro’s stories to challenge the notion of an innate
maternal instinct in women. Her mothers do not flourish in their ‘natural’ role,
rather they feel entrapped. Their bodies become battlefields in which Munro
attempts to resolve tensions between personal identity and the maternal role. In
her stories, the maternal body loses its natural quality, becoming instead the site
of social constructs.
Munro portrays the maternal body as the site of a splitting. In her essay
‘Stabat Mater’ (1977) Julia Kristeva argues that it is a “simultaneously dual and
alien space”.4 She describes her own experience of pregnancy and childbirth: “My
body is no longer mine, it doubles up”.5 She wonders about the possible
connection between mother and baby: “What connection is there between myself,
or even more unassumingly between my body and this internal graft and fold,
which, once the umbilical cord has been severed is an inaccessible other?”6 While
attempting to connect to her child, the mother is also trying to stay in touch with
her sense of self. She cannot give herself fully to either the child or herself; she is
effectively torn. This splitting is portrayed in ‘My Mother’s Dream’ through Jill’s
pregnant body, which has been transformed beyond recognition: her feet are no
longer the same size, her legs have “swollen veins” and her nipples are “large and
dark and nubbly”.7 She is looking forward to a separation, anticipating it as the
end of her suffering and expecting a return to normal. Her body will once again be
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3

Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater,’ in The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 180.
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1977), 237.
5
Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater,’ 167.
6
Ibid., 178.
7
Alice Munro, 'My Mother’s Dream,’ in Lying Under the Apple Tree: New Selected Stories (London:
Vintage Books, 1998), 83.
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