I'm back again! Next time I decide to do something stupid like pinch hit, smack me and set me right.
I can't really point to any one work that I can look at and say this is what gives me the impression that society still treats marriage and motherhood as the end of a girl's story. Some of it has to do with our still very powerful "wedding as the most important day ever for a woman" we have especially in the states, with all the wedding based reality shows, and the way it is portrayed so clearly as the bride's day, etc. combined with the lack of representation of married women in action roles. In a cop drama, if there's a married character with a family, it's almost never a woman, for example, that gives me the impression. It's a pattern rather than any one work that declares it.
I don't think it's really a YA thing, (though I have seen some veeeeeery odd incarnations of this in YA, such as one series where the character has a daughter, and suddenly, the next book takes place fifteen years in the future and is all about her and her romantic prospects, and I'm like wait, didn't we leave mommy behind in a zombie apocalypse?) Marriage isn't all that common a theme in YA, and when it does show up, it's mostly a signifier for adulthood, which by its nature puts an end to a coming of age story. Motherhood would have to entail teen motherhood, and that brings its own storytelling problems. Though, there is an absence of mothers in general in YA. Along with a whole lot of orphans, most of the characters with only one parent killed off are missing their mothers, and if the mother is alive, she's usually absent.
It's not that I don't appreciate that being a mother is time consuming, and that doing heroic things takes you away from your kids. That's a given, and needs to be addressed when a mother does heroic things. However, I've noticed that there seem to be quite a few more fathers in fiction doing heroic things (the number of father/son teams in action movies, fathers acting on vengeance for dead wives and children, fathers rescuing their children in peril, or in older fantasy novels, fathers going off journeying) than there are mothers. I think that this has to do with two things, the construction of girlhood verses womanhood (girlhood, you can have adventures, womanhood you can't, marriage and motherhood breaks girlhood from womanhood) and also that society is way less comfortable with the concept of an absent mother as a hero than an absent father. A father can go off and do things without being seen as a bad parent in the same way a mother would, and thus lose audience sympathy.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2013-02-11 04:46 am (UTC)I can't really point to any one work that I can look at and say this is what gives me the impression that society still treats marriage and motherhood as the end of a girl's story. Some of it has to do with our still very powerful "wedding as the most important day ever for a woman" we have especially in the states, with all the wedding based reality shows, and the way it is portrayed so clearly as the bride's day, etc. combined with the lack of representation of married women in action roles. In a cop drama, if there's a married character with a family, it's almost never a woman, for example, that gives me the impression. It's a pattern rather than any one work that declares it.
I don't think it's really a YA thing, (though I have seen some veeeeeery odd incarnations of this in YA, such as one series where the character has a daughter, and suddenly, the next book takes place fifteen years in the future and is all about her and her romantic prospects, and I'm like wait, didn't we leave mommy behind in a zombie apocalypse?) Marriage isn't all that common a theme in YA, and when it does show up, it's mostly a signifier for adulthood, which by its nature puts an end to a coming of age story. Motherhood would have to entail teen motherhood, and that brings its own storytelling problems. Though, there is an absence of mothers in general in YA. Along with a whole lot of orphans, most of the characters with only one parent killed off are missing their mothers, and if the mother is alive, she's usually absent.
It's not that I don't appreciate that being a mother is time consuming, and that doing heroic things takes you away from your kids. That's a given, and needs to be addressed when a mother does heroic things. However, I've noticed that there seem to be quite a few more fathers in fiction doing heroic things (the number of father/son teams in action movies, fathers acting on vengeance for dead wives and children, fathers rescuing their children in peril, or in older fantasy novels, fathers going off journeying) than there are mothers. I think that this has to do with two things, the construction of girlhood verses womanhood (girlhood, you can have adventures, womanhood you can't, marriage and motherhood breaks girlhood from womanhood) and also that society is way less comfortable with the concept of an absent mother as a hero than an absent father. A father can go off and do things without being seen as a bad parent in the same way a mother would, and thus lose audience sympathy.
Belle Prater's Boy is now definitely on my list.