"All Those Years, I Kept Him Safe": Maternal Practice as Redemption and Resistance in Emma Donoghue's Room

Authors

  • Andrea O'Reilly School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University

Abstract

Philosopher Sara Ruddick argues in Maternal Thinking that maternal practice is characterized by three demands: preservation, growth, and social acceptance. “To be a mother,” Ruddick argues, “is to be committed to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training” (17). The first duty of mothers is to protect and preserve their children: “to keep safe whatever is vulnerable and valuable in a child” (80). The second demand requires mothers to nurture the child’s emotional and intellectual growth. The third demand of training and social acceptability of children, Ruddick emphasizes, “is made not by children’s needs but by the social groups of which a mother is a member. Social groups require that mothers shape their children’s growth in ‘acceptable’ ways. What counts as acceptable varies enormously within and among groups and cultures” (21). The article examines how the mother in the novel Room performs the three demands of maternal practice in both captivity and freedom. It considers how her strategies of preservation and care—in particular keeping her son with her in Room, her close bond with her son, and her act of extended breastfeeding—are reconstructed as bad mothering upon freedom as the first strategy is read as maternal selfishness and the second two are read as violations of social acceptability, particularly for a male child. The article argues that only when the mother reclaims the maternal authenticity of her maternal practice in Room can she and her son reclaim their connection and achieve healing.

Author Biography

Andrea O'Reilly, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University

Andrea O’Reilly, PhD, is professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. O’Reilly is founder and director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, and founder and publisher of Demeter Press. She is the co-editor or editor of twenty books, including Mothers, Mothering and Motherhood Across Cultural Differences: A Reader (2014) and Academic Motherhood in a Post Second Wave Context: Challenges, Strategies, Possibilities (2012). O’Reilly is author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart (2004), Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism, and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering (2006), and Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice (2016). She is editor of the first encyclopedia on motherhood, with three volumes and over seven hundred entries (2010). She is a recipient of the CAUT Sarah Shorten Award for outstanding achievements in the promotion of the advancement of women in Canadian universities and colleges. She is twice the recipient of York University’s “Professor of the Year Award” for teaching excellence, and in 2014, she was the first inductee into the Museum of Motherhood Hall of Fame.

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How to Cite

O’Reilly, A. (2017). "All Those Years, I Kept Him Safe": Maternal Practice as Redemption and Resistance in Emma Donoghue’s Room. Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 8(1-2). Retrieved from https://jarm3.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jarm/article/view/40451