Shriver, Lionel

Challenging Patriarchal Constructions

Many of her public comments and the themes of her narratives challenge patriarchal constructions of the maternal condition and the roles and images of women. In this she points to stereotype, ambivalence, and contradiction as the mainstays of sexual politics and social relationships. In a recent article in The Guardian, she acrimoniously deliberates on the ways in which the stereotype of the helpless female is recruited by both sides of the gender divide to leverage political or personal gain. She comments that Myanmar leader Ang San Suu Kyi might have been assassinated by now were she a man. Her “delicate, slight and fetching” appearance, according to Shriver, makes her a “perfect poster girl” for human rights in Myanmar. On the other hand, Shriver points to the ways in which men have dismissed women's attempts at political power by invoking these same obdurate stereotypes. She cites John Vorster's derisive criticism of Helen Suzman for “beating her ‘pretty little hands’ against apartheid.”

Shriver is also known and been taken to task for her outspoken and often hostile views on the maternal condition, which reveal the uncertainty and ambivalence that both she and a number of her fictional characters experience in relation to it. This is most pronounced in her controversial 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, a dark and often witty book in which the unlikable narrator, Eva Khatchadourian, ponders the possibility that in her inability to be a good mother, she has bred a son who becomes a mass murderer. Eva's son Kevin kills his father and sister as well as several of his classmates in cold blood.

The narrative explores Eva's attempts to understand herself and her responses to social expectations around mothering, family, and parenthood. Aware of the public interest in the Columbine School massacres at the time, Shriver commented that she did set out to write a story that was an explanation for these shootings. The book was rejected by Shriver's agent, who found it morally repugnant and refused to send it out to publishers. Shriver herself mailed the book out, and with the help of a number of supportive New York literary figures, eventually sold it to Counterpoint Press, a small U.S. publishing house. Since then, it has sold over 200,000 copies.

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