Our mothers' books

Good or bad, the mother. What can literature teach us about this figure?

Protective, adored, absent, toxic, devouring: the mother runs through literature like a living question, an inexhaustible motif. From the “matrix” mother – Gaïa, Marie, Anticlée – to contemporary figures, to the idea of a “mothering” AI that some see as the promise of humanity’s future, has our imagination really evolved?

After Marcel Proust, Romain Gary, Albert Cohen, after psychoanalysis – “A big crocodile in whose mouth you are, that’s the mother”, said Lacan – how do we get rid of guilt? In the post-MeToo era, as women write and rewrite their stories, what happens to the figure of the mother? And what of the non-mother, so dear to Simone de Beauvoir?

On the occasion of the latest issue of La Nouvelle Revue française, entitled “La mère, une création littéraire?”, and echoing the Bonnes mères exhibition at the Mucem, Olivia Gesbert brings together several writers who have contributed to the magazine. Between seminal readings and contemporary rereadings, their exchanges question what literature does to our representations of motherhood, and what the figure of the mother continues to stir in us today.