Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

“the mother” 127
nice, not simple, and the emotional consequences are neither nice nor
simple” (Part One 184).
For too many chilling years, women subjected themselves to
substandard, illegal procedures, risking their future reproductive health
and their very lives in order to relinquish their pregnancies. Sought
and performed in secret, abortion was an extreme, invasive, potentially
agonizing and lethal route to reproductive control. The operation was
not widely sanctioned by feminist decree or sanitized by medical
license. Poor women with less access to medical care often attempted
to self-abort by using anything sharp, scalding, or caustic. Abortions
were not legal in all of the United States until the 1973 landmark Roe
vs. Wade Supreme Court decision. In 1945, the Bronzeville woman of
Brooks’ poem, would have had recourse to few assuaging sentiments.
Her multiple abortions would have been deliberate, desperate remedies
induced by dire need. She would have, doubtless, been unable to
care for her children. She might have been compelled to live childfree
by a demanding man. Brooks offers no explanations beyond the
complex of emotions voiced by the mother and offers no moral judgment.
Abortion is the unabashed, unapologetic, unsentimentalized
focal point of this poem, but it is the mother’s sentimental apology
and suffering that demands attention and scrutiny.
The first obvious question must be: can a woman who has had
her pregnancies terminated claim to be a mother? Brooks declares
the speaker to be a mother in both the title and the placement of the
work at the forefront of the collection, just after “the old-marrieds”
and “kitchenette building” and just before “southeast corner.” This
quartet of poems moves from the pregnant “crowding darkness” (1, 6)
of “the old-marrieds,” with their unvoiced possibilities, their passivity
and inevitable distance from each other to the routine measly “hope”
of “lukewarm” bath water (“the kitchenette” 13). The sexuality of the
mother in the next poem at once upbraids and underscores the dispassionate
resignation of the couple in the first poem. The mother was
first a lover in order to “get” her pregnancies. She refuses her children’s
births only to reclaim their ghosts, her voice hopeless but filled with
passion. Yet passion is not inviolate and memory will be desecrated
by desertion or disinterest, so suggests the next poem, the ballad
“southeast corner.” The passion of building a “School of Beauty” (1)
succumbs, of course, with the death of the school’s proprietor—her
status, her fortune gone to dust and her enterprise transmuted into a