Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 24

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hers. Unfortunately, it is not so simple. Her body remains distorted: she is “like a
stiff old woman”.8
This is a physical translation of the permanent change motherhood imposes
on Jill’s life: her career as a violinist is interrupted. During the pregnancy, she
cannot play: “her fingers had got too puffy now to try to play the violin”.9 After the
birth, her body is changed to such an extent that she still struggles to play. The
violin “gives her back a stubborn distortion of everything she intends”.10 Her sense
of self comes into conflict with her new role as mother. She cannot go back to the
way things were and her lack of connection to the child might be due to her
resentment for this new state of things. Playing violin was what felt natural to Jill
and the baby hinders this normally effortless act. It is significant that the birth
takes place during the father’s funeral; it is a symbolic death for Jill. Baraitser
points out that motherhood is a loss as well as a gain: “Though one gains a child,
one loses […] the irreplaceable clarity of the borders of the self”.11 She argues
that alongside the joys of motherhood, there is a “quiet mourning” for this clear
sense of self.12 In ‘My Mother’s Dream’, Jill mourns for a time where she knew
who she was, where she could look in the mirror and recognise herself.
Magdalene Redekop picks up on this tension between the child and the self in
her book, Mother and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. Redekop asks:
“How do we negotiate our lives between these conflicting needs and desires?”,
suggesting that “Munro’s stories urge us to begin by accepting the reality of
spectacle itself instead of turning a blind eye to it in our hunger for maternal
essence”.13 In this, Redekop points to the invisible nature of the problem;
motherhood is largely understood as a state untouched by social constructs and
therefore outside the bonds of social concern. In her stories, Munro reveals
motherhood as a performance, an entirely social act, through a mise-en-scéne of
the maternal body. Redekop argues that “Munro’s gift for ‘realism’ […] leaves us
confronting a blind spot made visible”.14 Munro uses the visual concreteness of
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Munro, ‘My Mother’s Dream,’ 93.
Ibid., 93.
10
Ibid., 100.!
11
Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The ethics of interruption (London: Routledge, 2009), 49.
12
Ibid., 49.
13
Magdalene Redekop, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro (London: Routledge,
1992), 178.
14
Ibid.,7.!
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