¶ … Mother, by Gwendolyn Brooks. Specifically, it will look critically at the poem, and what other critics have to say about it.
THE MOTHER
Set in Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks fashioned one of the earliest portraits of urban, working-class Black womanhood published in the United States" (Aptheker 61). Brook's poem "The Mother," written in 1945, is a lament to a woman's unborn babies who never lived because of abortion.
It is a touching and disturbing poem, clearly written by a despairing and contrite woman who is questioning her choices, and mourning the children she might have known, but never got the chance to live. "Though why should I whine, / Whine that the crime was other than mine?-- / Since anyhow you are dead. / Or rather, or instead, / You were never made (Brooks).
Critic Harold Bloom called the poem one of her "most notable achievements" (Bloom and Loos 60). However, he sees the narrator as "alienated, seemingly disaffected narrator of 'the mother' who laments the loss of her children but with the resurgent, hopeful voice that closes the poem: 'Believe me, I loved you all'" (Bloom and Loos 60). As another critic, Barbara Johnson relates, the poem exists solely because a child does not exist (Crewe 2), which makes the unborn child the central theme and purpose of the poem.
Brooks seems to write directly from experience in the poem, which makes it all the more poignant and thought provoking. She is repenting over her earlier choices, and suffering because of them, and shares this suffering with her readers. This poem is not only the repentance of a woman who is questioning her choices; it illustrates the black woman's experience in the 1930s and 40s. They could not afford children, and so they had to destroy them in order to keep on living themselves. It shows the terrible choices we all have to make in life, right or wrong.
References
Aptheker, Bettina. Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.
Bloom, Harold, and Pamela Loos, eds. Gwendolyn Brooks. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. "The Mother." Virginia Commonwealth University. 2003. 27 Jan. 2003. http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng301/mother.htm
Crewe, Jonathan. "Baby Killers." Differences 7.3 (1995): 1-23.
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