17 pages • 34 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksThe Mother
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Black Arts Movement, Activism, and Civil Rights
The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was informed by contemporary political and social movements in the United States. Beginning in theater and spreading through literature, music, and dance, artists sought to represent African Americans’ unique culture and experiences and amplify the celebratory spirit of Black pride. An inherently political project, the Black Arts Movement resisted the oppressive systems of race-based slavery and Jim Crow laws. By lauding the innovation, persistence, and cultural achievements of Black people in the United States, the movement galvanized audiences toward the end of full economic, social, and legal liberation of Black Americans.
Women artists like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez comprised a feminist subsection of the Black Arts Movement. They critiqued male leaders for failing to address the specific plight of Black women, urging them to examine how gender roles and expectations fueled sexist oppression within the movement. Although movement leadership remained dominated by men, the persistence of these vocally-agitated women created a path for future Black feminist voices to be heard.
Cultural critic Larry Neal described the Black Arts Movement as the aesthetic arm of the Black Civil Rights Movement. On Black Arts and Black Power, he wrote: “both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics” (Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” Drama Review, 1968). A major part of this activism was the development of a Black aesthetic. Through the arts, new cultural institutions could be formed. Art for Black people, about Black people, by Black people created a new canon that supported and legitimized the cornerstone civil rights ideal that Black Americans must be ensured full civil liberties as part of their inherent right to self-determination.
At first glance, Gwendolyn Brooks’s work may appear to be unconcerned with politics. Her subjects, such as the woman in “the mother,” are much more concerned with the domestic than the public, the inner world rather than the outer world. However, her work serves an important purpose by affirming the personhood of Black women. The rich interior worlds of Brooks’s speakers argue for a political stance that takes the humanity of all Black women as a given.
Literary Context
New Criticism is a literary movement named for educator and essayist John Crowe Ransom’s book The New Criticism (1941). This mode of criticism was developed partially in response to prior critical movements that privileged historical and biographical information when examining a writer’s work. New Critics opposed this broad extratextual lens, advocating for close reading of the text itself as a whole, independent piece. The new critical approach prioritizes the reader’s firsthand engagement with the text, treating it as a closed ecosystem that contains its own self-sustaining logic and formal regulations. In this reading, not even authorial intent or audience reception may intrude on the critic’s examination of the text—it must stand for itself.
Opposing scholars condemned New Criticism for its neglect of the human facet of a text. New Historicism emerged as a response, arguing that to separate a text from its historical and authorial context is to miss something essential, and the systematic approach championed by New Criticism is nothing more than a failed attempt to turn an inherently subjective practice into an objective science. Anti-formalist sentiments in the 1970s and 1980s dismissed New Criticism’s close attention to skill. The resulting focus on content can have the unintended effect of overshadowing the craft inherent in a piece of poetry. Poets like Brooks have been denied the “detailed discussion of their works as works of art” (Evans, Robert C. “’Abortions Will Not Let You Forget:’ A Close Reading of Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘the mother.’” CLA Journal, 2011). Close analysis and careful attention to Brooks’s extraordinary craft and artistry can complement the political and cultural importance of works like “the mother.”
Related Titles
By Gwendolyn Brooks
