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When my son was a few months old, I perceived that a curtain had been torn aside, and the world shown to me as it was: held up by an Atlas-like Mother, upon whom rained down crumbs, dirt and bodily fluids. This distasteful revelation is in tune with the spirit of Jacqueline Rose's new book, in which mothers are shown to be the secret repositories of our physical, psychic and political mess. Rose argues that mothers have always been what Bion (1963) called ‘containers’ of unprocessed feeling, but that in our current political climate, which negates the value of care or vulnerability, this responsibility takes on newly intensified and privatised forms, leaving mothers fit to burst. This crisis of containment has its uses. If mothers are experts on the violence and ecstasy of the intersubjective realm, where bodies and minds break their banks, spill and merge, Rose suggests they must have something to teach us about our political arrangements, in which impenetrable borders are now glorified, and self-sufficiency made the highest virtue.
Mothers expands upon Rose's substantial 2014 article in The London Review of Books, and seeks a well-read, but certainly not academic, audience for her manifesto of maternal rebellion (the text would have made an exemplary set of Reith Lectures). In its quiet celebration of unreason it continues to explore the terrain covered in Women in Dark Times (2014), while also distilling recent scholarly work on the phenomenology of the maternal. This now thriving academic area revolves around the question of maternal ambivalence — the entanglement of love and rejection first highlighted by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born (1976), and the meta-ambivalence middle-class mothers (especially university lecturers, one might say) feel about their delegation of child-rearing — and other dirty work — to working-class and ethnic minority women. In response to this, Rose demands mothers become conscious of themselves as an affective rather than economic class