Abstract
What is it to be a mother when you have been forsaken as a wife? Surprisingly, this question is largely absent from analysis of the “abandoned” woman in both literary texts and the cultural narratives that inform them. Taking Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed (1967) as the classic account of the abandoned wife, this chapter will argue that the mother is missing from the dominant patriarchal discourse of marriage. Too frequently critical attention is devoted to the plight of the failed wife at the expense of any acknowledgment of her successful mothering, an omission that attests to the invisibility of “motherwork” within the ideological construction of motherhood as natural, normative and apolitical. Situating Patricia Highsmith’s Edith’s Diary (1977) and Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002) in dialogue with Beauvoir’s text, this discussion will show how each text renders visible the labour of mothering, revealing not only how the literary protagonists “read” their respective maternal scripts but also how motherhood might be re-written once divested of patriarchal assumptions. Significantly, each character uses writing in order to process her changed circumstances, revealing the power of narrative to shape the material conditions of experience.