Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

“THE MOTHER”
(GWENDOLYN BROOKS)
,.
“The Taboo in Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘the mother’ ”
by Kate Falvey, New York City College of
Technology of the City University of New York
Gwendolyn Brooks’ elegiac and hauntingly ruthless poem, “the
mother,” was controversial at the time of its composition. Brooks had
to insist on its inclusion in her 1945 collection, A Street in Bronzeville,
over the objections of her literary advocate, Richard Wright. The poem
has a rare power to ignite conflicting responses and to slyly compel
readers to question and qualify a too-sure initial reading. Certainly, the
poem conjures the powerlessness and straitened socioeconomic conditions
that compel the mother-narrator’s extreme response and ultimate
self-victimization. Also at stake in the poem is the meaning of motherhood
itself, both as an identity and identifier—with the ferocity, the
losses, the self-pity and self-justification, the guilt, and despair that
comprise such a vexed, singular experience. That the poem is spoken
by a non-mother, one who has aborted her children out of necessity,
in defiance, with tremendous ambivalence, is the central—and perhaps
misleading—irony of this lyrically charged poem.
The poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by a Bronzeville
woman who has had multiple abortions. She perceives these aborted
fetuses as physical facts, as children, and sees the lives they might have
lived had she not intervened and “killed” (11) them. She addresses her
“dim dears” (13) and offers a litany of what she stole from them and
denied herself: “If I stole your births and your names, / Your straight
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