If there’s one thing a woman can never be forgiven for, it’s being a bad mother. When Rachel Cusk published A Lifetime Job in 2001 (first translated into Spanish by Libros del Asteroid in 2023), it was a complete revolution. She talked about the longing for freedom, the desire to escape, the feeling of being locked in a cell. The naturalization of the concept of bad mother in literature is a new phenomenon. And it continues to be associated with a terrible sense of guilt. The sin of not being perfect, of prioritizing your own life over those of those who depend on your care.
To put ourselves in this situation, let’s cite two contemporary examples of literary fiction: Myriam, the protagonist of Leila Slimani’s Sweet Song, is a mother who commits murder by leaving her children in the care of another woman to save her professional life. to them; and the narrator of Las madres no, written by Katixa Agirre, leaves her son in the nursery every day so that he can write during the hours he understands that everyone should devote himself to caring. Whatever the hero’s vital choice, it always seems wrong.
We asked four writers who covered these topics how they handled the plot decisions about female characters and motherhood. And in addition, how do they do this from crime fiction?
family and work life
One of the hallmarks of Laura Lippman (Atlanta, 1959) is her creation of strong female characters full of contradictions. Lady of the Lake (Salamandra, 2023) is set in the 1960s and its protagonist, Maddie, is “yes, brutally ambitious.” Family life incompatible with work? “This is a tough question since my marriage ended three years ago, and I sometimes wonder if things would have been different if I had found happiness in a more traditional setting. But for me, motherhood is the complement to my life as a writer. In fact, it’s hard to keep working at a pretty steady pace as a mother. I enjoy the challenge, it’s something that many women have warned me would be impossible. But of course this comes from a place of great privilege because I have the means to pay for the help I need.”
Claudia Piñeiro rescues the protagonist of Tuya in El tiempo de las moscas (Alfaguara, 2023), a story in which Inés highlights the urgency of her daily life in the care of her teenage daughter. “Full professional and family life in the way that traditionally makes us believe we should participate is incompatible or demanding too much effort. If we women have to keep ourselves busy and take on the daily tasks of family life alone or with little help, we may not have time to fully develop our chosen profession. Rather than giving up, I think you should assess the situation and look for options for sharing shared tasks.
defective assets
The responsibility of care falls to women and mothers. And they are rarely forgiven for mistake. This is the reason why “bad moms”, flawed beings, appear in fiction, demonstrating the difficulty of facing this role. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s (Michigan, 1962) stories are full of fallacies. From the protagonist of Once Upon a River (Dirty Works, 2019) to the characters in the stories of Women and Other Animals (Dirty Works, 2023). Yes, man is imperfect, woman is human, mother is woman and therefore mothers are imperfect. In literature, we are glad that people are imperfect. If you have a great person, you have a religion. If you have an imperfect hero, you can have literature. He even went so far as to say, “It seems unfair that while every mother is expected to be as perfect as the Virgin Mary, babies are never expected to be as perfect as Jesus. All mothers should wear a banner or T-shirt that reads ‘I am not the Virgin Mary’. To get used to.’”
Marie Ndiaye (Loiret, France, 1967), author of, among others, Mine is revenge (Gatopardo, 2021) and La chef (Gatopardo, 2022), eschews the label of the social novel and affirms: “It always bothers me when it’s associated with each other. to community issues with my characters or my stories. I am not writing about the issue of women oppressed by patriarchy. As a citizen, I can think of patriarchy and fight against it. As a writer, I don’t think so.”
There was no place for female characters in the origins of crime fiction. The genre was highly urban, and the field of action of women in those years was limited to the four walls of the domestic space. There was no place for mothers, daughters or wives. From these social constraints emerged the character of the femme fatale; it was an archetype that suited this kind of novel but condemned the protagonists to succumb to a cliché that should be revised or even forgotten.
“Deadly woman”
“The femme fatale exists only in the male gaze, or in the female gaze that recklessly accepts this framework,” says Lippman. she is attractive to him. Femme fatale is a masculine creation, a justification, a rationalization. But it is also an opportunity. If men believe women can screw them up, why not take advantage of this fact?
In her stories, Campbell says, women “do their best to handle a difficult situation” and sometimes resort to “sexual tricks to stay alive.” “Sex has always been something that the powerful can buy from the less powerful and steal from the less fortunate. And sex is something less powerful that people may need when they have nothing else to trade. I would like to think that our society has made great progress, but in the United States.” We can’t even pass the Equal Rights Amendment in 2023, which gives equal rights to men and women,” she adds.
Pineiro emphasized: «The concept of femme fatale must be eliminated. The world is full of manipulative, psychopathic men and women, men who manipulate others through their noses, and if so, I think that names closer to this concept should be sought. The femme fatale is supposedly such an attractive woman that the poor man falls head over heels and falls in love with her. Everything in this build looks old and lost to me.
For Ndiaye, “femmes fatales are very interesting to us as characters, they are the projection of a ghost or a fear or something that I missed.” Great characters that stay in our memory for a long time are often complex, not necessarily gentle, full of conflicting emotions. When a character looks like a prototype to us, it may be because the author failed to give it the complexity of any human being.
The fact that detective novels have represented female characters in such a biased way for such a long time inevitably brings with it the question whether it is the writers who renew the genre and give these heroes the presence and character they deserve.
“As an atheist, I believe in fiction,” says Piñeiro. And anyone is free to write about whatever they want. I think that the subject of motherhood in conflict has started to be shown by women because it is the subject that calls us. But if a man wanted to write about these subjects, he could do that too, why not. Along the same lines, Campbell states that “both male and female writers should write realistically about men and women.”
double edged sword
But, Lippman says, “fiction can help us understand that much of what we think about motherhood is an invention. The traditional notion of motherhood is a double-edged sword. It crushes women. It holds them in place while they’re devastated by their flaws as mothers. It’s crucial that women write these stories.” Ndiaye says she “likes when female artists show different kinds of female characters, it’s very depressing for both men and women: you can be a woman and still be trapped in a very stereotypical representational system.” ».