Motherhood vs. Selfhood: The Southern Woman’s Battle
By: Megan Sheely

“Mothers are the only goddesses in whom the whole world believes. – message in a Chinese fortune cookie” (Schweitzer 158). This quote lends a touch of irony when discussing the dilemma of the southern woman. As mothers, these women are unhappy and unsatisfied. The battle for independence from one’s family responsibilities is a common theme in southern literature. It can be clearly seen in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The main characters in each of these novels, Edna, Janie, and Celie, respectively, are southern women rejecting the norms of their societies. They have more than simply their desire to be free of their unwanted social chains in common, they all wished to reject the motherhood that ties them to these social norms. Edna, married with two children, looked to the sea to grant her freedom; Janie, married three times, without children, tried to find herself in different men; finally, Celie, forced to raise Albert’s children, never experienced intimacy until Shug came into her life. Although these women had different stories, different backgrounds, and lived in different time periods, they each faced the same obstacle, motherhood and familial responsibilities. The authors in the three novels mentioned above use motherhood as an obstacle in the characters’ lives to convey the idea that one can not truly find herself by including children in the scheme of their lives.

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