Suleiman, Susan Rubin

Mother as Self versus Mother as Written

Suleiman's analytic framework is a combination of psychoanalytic feminism and literature. She uses American fiction written by mothers as a commentary on real-life predicaments. Focusing on the mother's discourse in American fiction, she presents an indirect expression of mothers' fantasies and emotions. Through her writings, Suleiman criticizes psychoanalysis for being a theory of childhood, which treats the mother as an essentially silent object; in other words, psychoanalysis exclusively focuses on the self of the child, and therefore, the mother's voice is missing. In addition, she maintains that in classic psychoanalytic theory of normal female development, mothers do not create works of art because all of their creative drives find an outlet in the production of children. Alternatively, Suleiman focuses on the portrait of a mother as an artist and aims to achieve a subjective notion of “the mother as she writes” rather than of “the mother as she is written.”

Suleiman offers an alternative way of thinking about the triangle of mother work/creativity and child by listening to the inner discourse of mother-writers who express themselves in their words. She uses literature's heroine, the mother-writer, to emphasize the motherhood experience of daily inner conflict and self-doubt, caught between the mothers' creative needs and the child's needs.

In her analysis of American fiction, she views the way mothers see the subject of writing and motherhood as reflected in two major themes: opposition and integration. Motherhood is experienced by the creative mother as an obstacle and as a source of conflict, and at the same time, as a source of connection to the work. The mother's creative self develops through the daily struggle against herself, accompanied by feelings of betrayal, aggression, splitting, and guilt toward her child. From the fiction, it is clear that each moment of the mother's creative self-absorption is experienced as destructive to her child.

Other Conceptualizations of the Mother

Another triangle Suleiman focuses on is that of the mother, mother surrogate, and child. In this triangle, the mother sees herself as somehow threatened by the intrusion of a third person, a maternal figure that might displace her in her child's affection while she is dealing with her nonmaternal activities.

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