Essay on 'Motherhood' by Sheila Heti

Student’s Name Professor’s Name Course Date A Critical Evaluation of “Motherhood” by Sheila Heti “Motherhood” by Sheila Heti is a famous and revolutionary American novel of the twentieth century. It bluntly and humorously challenges the quality of motherhood in women from a woman’s perspective. The novel’s female protagonist unfolds the novel’s main subject quite lively. Written in an autofictional style, the novel combines reality and fiction to approach its main theme of motherhood. Heti’s experience of living through two waves of feminism appears in the novel through feminist womanhood, showing a protagonist standing between social and female ideals to make her choice. Besides, it shows a constant drama between societal expectations and a woman’s desire to have children. Her motivation leads to the importance of autonomy/self-government, particularly in the case of motherhood. However, the author shows an educated and urban woman while neglecting the scenario from a rural and ordinary woman’s perspective, who is uneducated and whose opinion is based on social, historical, cultural, and familial factors. Heti’s “Motherhood” is an autofiction novel packed with feminist womanhood, exhibiting a woman between societal anticipations and personal agency, questioning the value of autonomy in a traditional society. The novel is autofictional, with its original form, structure, and language to tell Heti’s story from Heti’s perspective in a traditional society. Heti, like her contemporary writers such as Virginia Wolf, disobeys conformist behaviour in a conventional society by opposing one of the most sensitive societal traditions – motherhood (Heti 150). Living in the final years of the twentieth century in America after a double wave of feminism, the author aligns traditional mothers with Jeffery Jerome Cohen’s monsters from his “monster theory.” The mothers, according to the theory, are designed by their cultural patriarchy (Finnigan 3). The era when Heti defined the conformist mother as a monster through her literary works marks when motherhood was historically romanticized. Bearing and rearing children was the woman’s primary task, and she was incomplete and unworthy without this essential characteristic. The author, breaking with the socially set ideals, questioned the quality and validity of the norm through the underlined novel. She combines reality and fiction by unveiling her truth through novel characters (Heti 138). Therefore, the novel is autofictional, revealing Heti’s violation of cultural norms through a reformed work of literature. Apart from Heti’s subjectivity, the novel “Motherhood” is autofictional as the author’s individual familial and social experiences combine with her creativity. Throughout the story, the author invites the reader to think about the possibilities associated with a woman’s existence besides biological productivity. She is unwilling to glorify the conventional role of a woman as a mother while favouring her ideals of feminism. It indicates the author’s aversion to motherhood, possibly from her familial, social, and cultural experiences. She had a problematic relationship with her mother, who lived her life with psychological problems and raised her developing uncertainties in her (Shirm 309). This resulted in the author’s confused personality, leaving her uncertain about having children like her mother. The past created a measureless emptiness in the author, leading her to seek identity in a socially sick society demanding sacrifices to glorify a woman. The reader finds uncertainties about becoming a mother in her novel (Heti 176). These uncertainties are not her ultimate decision to violate a woman’s natural ability and responsibility but rather a contemplation about the possibilities associated with a woman’s place in society. Reca...