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.
Themes
Motherhood
Upon closer examination, the deceptively obvious title reveals a deep exploration of motherhood. Since it’s unclear in the poem whether the speaker has any living children, the reader is forced to focus on her motherhood as it relates exclusively to abortion. The speaker pushes toward unequivocal true statements throughout the poem, and she still she struggles to differentiate between potential and actual motherhood, children had and not had. Evidence for birth is sprinkled throughout: the speaker “contracted” (Line 12), she moved to nurse her babes, and they were indeed born. At the same time, these children are defined by the childhoods they never had. These absences nonetheless take up space on the page. They are described, in intimate detail, and so the negative space they occupy becomes a sort of presence on its own.
The mother must define whether or not her children “were” (Line 26) in order to know if she is indeed a mother. Either way, a hard truth underlies her avowed love. If her children did truly live, then she must take responsibility for their deaths. If not, then she is free from the guilt and shame associated with abortion, but she also loses the ability to call herself a mother.
Power and Agency
The speaker never tries to justify her choice or explain her reasoning, but she does struggle with the exact nature of her agency in the matter. Line 21 (“Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate”) reveals the speaker’s conflicting feelings about her actions. She was both deliberate and not. She had a choice, and at the same time, she did not. The speaker’s use of second person in the first stanza differentiates between the “you” who did these things and her present self, but that distance collapses under the weight of her children’s voices on the wind. The use of past-perfect tense in the second stanza is perhaps another attempt to create distance. Phrases like “I have heard” and “I have said” (Lines 11, 14) clarify that the actions she’s describing have been completed, and she has no apparent plans to repeat them.
The syntax of the first line of this poem turns the abortion from an action the speaker takes into an actor in and of itself. The subject of the sentence is “abortion,” the object is “you,” and the verb is “let,” as in allow or permit (Line 1). The abortion wields agency over the speaker. The abortion prohibits her from choosing to forget.
What exactly is inhibiting the speaker’s agency is unstated in “the mother,” but evidence can be gathered from other poems. In “kitchenette building,” the speaker gestures toward the persecuting powers of gender roles, racial segregation, and systematic oppression. The mother in this poem is weighed down by the pressures of her marriage, her finances, and cooking for her children. A dream hovers over her for a brief moment of quiet, and it is quashed in the last stanza: “We wonder, but not well! Not for a minute! / Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, / We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it” (Lines 11-13).
The speaker indulges in wonder for just a breath, and then she’s interrupted by the less lofty goal of having a warm bath. The speaker’s daily life is rendered so demanding by her role as a mother, wife, and housekeeper that she doesn’t have complete agency over her own thoughts.
Fact and Faith
The speaker in “the mother” holds herself to high standards of precision. If a statement is inaccurate, she corrects herself immediately (“But that too, I am afraid, / Is faulty” [Lines 27-28]). In a conditional sentence that stretches across seven lines, she uses the word “if” three times (Lines 14-20). This pains her greatly, to the point that she wonders aloud in the poem if she will be successful: “oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?” (Line 28). The desperation implicit in her defining and re-defining becomes explicit in this moment of exasperation.
When the speaker finds a statement she can put her faith in, she doubts whether the listener will trust her. This is evidenced by her repeated pleas of “Believe me” in the final stanza (Lines 31-32). The speaker lists images in rapid succession and flits from one thought to another throughout the poem, and so in this distressed state, she feels the need to clarify when she speaks with certainty. There is also the issue of trust between her and the children. The “crime” of their deaths, after all, is hers (Line 22). Again, the desperation manifests in uncertainty that her words will be properly understood.
Related Titles
By Gwendolyn Brooks
