Queering Motherhood: An Exploration of Maternal Ambivalence and Queer Spaces in Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park

Abstract

[eng] This study aims to explore the huge influence that maternal ambivalence plays in Rachel Cusk’s novel, Arlington Park, and analyse how the experience of moments of disorientation in space – or epiphanies – leads each female protagonist to re-define her identity. Maternal ambivalence is “the experience shared variously by all mothers in which loving and hating feelings for their children exist side by side” (Parker 1). The conception of maternal ambivalence as the ugly, forbidden face of motherhood even led Erica Jong to be “booed of the stage by a feminist audience” (Berlant 237) during a conference in which she read “a series of poems that celebrated pregnancy and birth.” (Berlant 39) Thus, Cusk’s focus on maternal ambivalence offers a queer perspective of motherhood that forces the “[destabilization of] the existing social relations, institutions and discourses” (Gibson 6). Simultaneously, Cusk’s introduction of epiphanies, a series of disorientating moments experienced by her female protagonists, offers them the chance to re-orientate their life paths and opens the door to a new reading of Arlington Park, using Sara Ahmed’s concepts of disorientation, queerness, and re-orientation. In order to analyse the viability of these two interpretations, a close exploration of the main novel is carried out by referring to several secondary sources, such as: Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), Andrea O’Reilly’s Matricentric Feminism: A Feminism for Mothers (2020), Margaret Gibson’s introduction to Queering Motherhood: Narrative and Theoretical Perspectives (2014), Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint (2008), or Rozsika Parker’s Mother Love/ Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence (1996), among others.