Motherhood and Representation

<p>From novels of the nineteenth century to films of the 1990s American culture abounds with images of white middle-class mothers. In <em>Motherhood and Representation</em> E. Ann Kaplan considers how the mother appears in three related spheres: the historical in which she charts changing representations of the mother from 1830 to the postmodernist present; the psychoanalytic which discusses theories of the mother from Freud to Lacan and the French Feminists; and the mother as she is figured in cultural representations: in literary and film texts such as <em>East Lynne Marnie and the <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em></em> as well as in journalism and popular manuals on motherhood. Kaplan's analysis identifies two dominant paradigms of the mother as `Angel' and `Witch' and charts the contesting and often contradictory discourses of the mother in present-day America.</p>