Motherhood has always been central to some strands of feminism, while being wilfully left out of others. From the campaigners fighting for children’s rights to their mothers after parental separation in the 19th century, to literary figures – such as Adrienne Rich in the 1970s and Rachel Cusk in the 1990s – who have made space for maternal ambivalence, women have battled to claim maternity without becoming trapped within it. Now, as issues of surrogacy and trans motherhood pose fresh challenges, feminism’s confrontation with the issue feels newly urgent. Siri Hustvedt joins the fray with a mixture of directness and obliqueness.
She takes on motherhood from every direction, combining memoir with ethnography, the history of science and psychoanalysis, literary and art criticism. The book begins with lovingly detailed portraits of Hustvedt’s mother and grandmother, and moves through essays on Wuthering Heights, the art of Louise Bourgeois, the nature of viruses and misogyny to end with a long tour de force exploration of the horrific death of Sylvia Marie Likens in 1965.
The essays are disparate, and span a 10-year period, but the voice is consistent, combining assured erudition with more playful questioning, always thoughtful and capable of surprising shifts of register and even genre (the odd fairytale and poem are interpolated along the way). Cumulatively, an argument develops. We all emerge from mothers, yet key aspects of motherhood are left out of our culture, and mothers often become the scapegoat for society’s ills (as in Jacqueline Rose’s account, where mothers are “the objects of licensed cruelty”).
Hustvedt gently interrogates her own father’s lack of interest in his mother, the grandmother whose story Hustvedt now excavates. She sees this as indicative of “the forgotten land of the mother and mothers, the speechless realm of the womb”. She thinks that we need to make more of our origins in the womb partly because pregnancy and birth are processes of bodily entanglement that remind us of our general interconnectedness. She worries that scientists’ fantasies of genetic determinism leave out the role of the female body: “Pregnancy is a chimeric state, and the chimera is still a terrifying animal because it involves mixing.” This general, terrifying mixedness has also been revealed by Covid. Hustvedt takes the line that if we acknowledge the constant interplay within and between bodies and between bodies and viruses, we will gain access to a larger vision of our interconnected, borderless culture. She gives these ideas zest and exactness by focusing, for instance, on the placenta as a forgotten organ.
The essay on Likens isn’t explicitly framed as being about motherhood but mothers are everywhere here. Sylvia was left with her informal foster mother, Gertrude Baniszewski, and her seven children, because her mother had just been jailed for shoplifting. Baniszewski abused Sylvia from early on, co-opting her children and neighbours into the ever-escalating process, which ended with Sylvia being branded with the words “I am a prostitute and proud of it” on her abdomen, and tortured to semi-accidental death.
The story has long fascinated feminists; Kate Millett wrote an engrossing, obsessive book about it, where she imagines her way into the heads of the central figures. Now Hustvedt combines a novelistic sense of the passions and complexities of real lives with an incisive feel for political polemic and theoretical astuteness. She thinks that the story has been treated as too aberrant and insufficiently political. She reads it as an efflorescence of mimetic desire as defined by René Girard, in which violence became a contagion and required a scapegoat, Sylvia, who was transformed from obedient virgin into malevolent whore.
“The crowd gathers at a rally or it forms online,” Hustvedt writes, reminding us that it is those of whom society has asked too much who have most need of scapegoats. Baniszewski was invested in her role as a mother, and seems to have felt so ashamed of her failures (her own unmarried daughter was pregnant) that she needed to shift the blame under the guise of maternal correction. This is an unexpected place to end the collection, but fittingly so. With collective violence, mob feeling and mass shaming on the rise, Hustvedt urges vigilance as we parse the stories of motherhood the world presents.
• Lara Feigel is the author of Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing. Mothers, Fathers and Others by Siri Hustvedt is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
