Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a "Good" Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence
Sarah LaChance Adams
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0231166753
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When a mother kills her child, we call her a bad mother, but, as this book shows, even mothers who intend to do their children harm are not easily categorized as "mad" or "bad." Maternal love is a complex emotion rich with contradictory impulses and desires, and motherhood is a conflicted state in which women constantly renegotiate the needs mother and child, the self and the other.
Applying care ethics philosophy and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir to real-world experiences of motherhood, Sarah LaChance Adams throws the inherent tensions of motherhood into sharp relief, drawing a more nuanced portrait of the mother and child relationship than previously conceived. The maternal example is particularly instructive for ethical theory, highlighting the dynamics of human interdependence while also affirming separate interests. LaChance Adams particularly focuses on maternal ambivalence and its morally productive role in reinforcing the divergence between oneself and others, helping to recognize the particularities of situation, and negotiating the difference between one's own needs and the desires of others. She ultimately argues maternal filicide is a social problem requiring a collective solution that ethical philosophy and philosophies of care can inform.
some respects,18 as I show in chapter 3, the mother-child relationship can also be competitive. That is, there can be very real conflicts between the needs and desires of mothers and those of her child. In fact, it is not because the mother-child relationship is typically harmonious that it is an instructive case for ethics. Contrary to the idea that maternal care is primarily “natural” stands the well-known fact that mothers abuse and neglect their children. Such occurrences are commonly deemed
emancipation. Even those who are freed of the rule of the father may find themselves chafing under the yoke of children. Care ethics validates the inquiry into familial relationships against traditional philosophical disinterest in these concerns. They require us to rethink the sources of moral values and interactions by expanding our notion of the origins of morality to include nurturance and care. Some theorists rest care ethics on the maternal relationship, making it the quintessential model
we cannot escape. This is the idea of freedom shared by Sartre in Being and Nothingness that “every man is free, that there is no way of his not being free.”15 For example, Beauvoir claims that the victim of torture is free in the natural sense; she may still assume an attitude of compliance, forgiveness, or rebellion. Clearly, this notion of freedom attends less to the constraining power of situation than ethical freedom does, even though it acknowledges the importance of the existence of
worry that care ethics is a “slave morality.”6 They argue that differences between feminine and masculine ethics are induced by men’s dominance of women and that to affirm these differences is to affirm the injustice that caused them. Nevertheless, every human being needs to be taken care of by someone else, at least in infancy. This is a basic fact of human existence, and, as I will continue to argue throughout this book, it is the denial of the need for human care that allows care work to
In Caregiving: Reading in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics, ed. Suzanne Gordon, Patricia Benner, and Nel Noddings, 256–277. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Gothlin, Eva. “Beauvoir and Sartre on Appeal, Desire and Ambiguity.” In The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Margaret Simons, 132–145. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Greens, Naomi. “Sartre, Sexuality and The Second Sex.” Philosophy and Literature 4.2 (1980). Grier, Phillip, ed. Identity and