"Children aren’t everything": Maternal Ambivalences in Nella Larsen’s Fiction

Authors

  • Marie-Luise Löffler

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.103

Abstract

Focusing on the portrayal of motherhood in black women’s speculative fiction, this essay discusses Jewelle Gomez’s short story “Louisiana 1850“ (1991) and explores how Gomez establishes an egalitarian interracial maternal relationship between a white woman and a slave child. I will demonstrate how the trope of a maternal vampire in particular not only functions in the story to make a mothering relationship plausible, but ultimately challenges and dismantles normative maternal categories, both white and black.

Author Biography

Marie-Luise Löffler

Marie-Luise Löffler earned her M.A. from the University of Leipzig in 2006, majoring in American Studies and Art History. Her studies have taken her to the United States, where she was a student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, researched at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and was most recently a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on her PhD at the American Studies Department of the University of Leipzig, where she focuses on the construction of interracial motherhood and mothering relationships in contemporary African American fantasy and science fiction writing. Her academic interests can be broadly summarized as falling between the fields of African American Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, and Gender Studies, focusing in particular on the depiction of whiteness in contemporary African American literature and feminist theories of motherhood.

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How to Cite

Löffler, Marie-Luise. “‘Children aren’t everything’: Maternal Ambivalences in Nella Larsen’s Fiction”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 9, Mar. 2012, doi:10.5283/copas.103.

Issue

Vol. 9 (2008)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.