an essay on love and cruelty by jacqueline rose

• Politics, Philosophy & Social Sciences
• Social Sciences

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty Hardcover – 19 April 2018

Mothers : An Essay on Love and Cruelty is guided by a simple argument: that motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge - or rather bury - the reality of our own conflicts, of psychic life, and what it means to be fully human. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair.

To the familiar claim that too much is asked of mothers - a long-standing feminist plaint - Rose adds a further dimension. She questions what we are doing when we ask mothers to carry the burden of everything that is hardest to contemplate about our society and ourselves. By making mothers the objects of licensed cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world's iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart.

To demonstrate this vicious paradox at work, Rose explores a range of material: investigative writing and policies on motherhood, including newspaper reports, policy documents, and law; drama, novels, poetry, and life stories past and present; social history, psychoanalysis, and feminism. An incisive, rousing call to action, Mothers unveils the crucial idea that unless we recognise what role we are asking mothers to perform in the world, and for the world, we will continue to tear both the world and mothers to pieces.

• Print length 256 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Faber & Faber
• Publication date 19 April 2018
• Dimensions 14 x 2.5 x 20.5 cm
• ISBN-10 0571331432
• ISBN-13 978-0571331437
• See all details

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Product description

Book description, about the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Faber & Faber; Main edition (19 April 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0571331432
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0571331437
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14 x 2.5 x 20.5 cm
• 3,883 in Anthropology & Sociology Biographies

About the author

Jacqueline rose.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• UK Modern Slavery Statement
• Sustainability
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell on Amazon Handmade
• Sell on Amazon Launchpad
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect and build your brand
• Associates Programme
• Fulfilment by Amazon
• Seller Fulfilled Prime
• Advertise Your Products
• Independently Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Instalments by Barclays
• Amazon Platinum Mastercard
• Amazon Classic Mastercard
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Payment Methods Help
• Shop with Points
• Top Up Your Account
• Top Up Your Account in Store
• COVID-19 and Amazon
• Track Packages or View Orders
• Delivery Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Amazon Mobile App
• Customer Service
• Accessibility
• Conditions of Use & Sale
• Privacy Notice
• Cookies Notice
• Interest-Based Ads Notice

• Politics & Social Sciences
• Social Sciences

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video, download Flash Player

Follow the author

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty Paperback – May 21 2019

Purchase options and add-ons.

A daring and provocative book-length essay on why we both romanticize and vilify mothers A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice. Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.

• Print length 254 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date May 21 2019
• Dimensions 13.97 x 1.45 x 20.96 cm
• ISBN-10 0374538476
• ISBN-13 978-0374538477
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Popular titles by this author

Product description

"Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers has already joined the canon of nonfiction books I hold most dear. This is in part because of the importance and luminous clarity of Rose’s argument, and in part because of the supremely intelligent and graceful prose in which she delivers it. Her writing here feels somehow both laser-focused in its analyses, and loose, roving, free. Her book distills a lifetime of psychoanalytic, literary, and political engagement into a fierce, generous study of human complexity―one which pushes us to reckon with the urgent question of how we might stop 'tearing mothers and the world to pieces.'" ―Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts "A sort of Rosetta Stone for the moment that examines the particular mix of fascination and dread that mothers engender . . . Rose is a calm and stylish writer whose rangy essays . . . have become indispensable reading during the current reckoning around power and sexuality." ―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Rose is, as ever, devastating in her elegance and striking in her ingenuity . . . Running throughout the book is the conviction that, in matters of both self and state, the boundaries between inside and outside are violent and blurred―a riddle for which mothers are the impossible key.” ―Tobi Haslett, Bookforum " Mothers is a passionate polemic . . . Rose's intellectual range is dazzling." ― The Economist "Dismantling the ideal is Jacqueline Rose’s purpose in Mothers . . . Searching always calmly and intelligently for reasons behind extreme feelings, Rose draws on a wide range of literary and philosophical sources." ―Ruth Scurr, The Times Literary Supplement (London) "As a literary scholar and psychoanalytic thinker, Rose has long insisted that we pay close attention to the subterranean fears, fantasies, and narratives that structure our most pressing sociopolitical problems . . . I was grateful to Rose for giving voice to [the] conflicted realities [of motherhood], for inviting her reader to acknowledge them without fear or shame . . . She had positioned herself as a mother to mothers, ready to soothe all of us who felt like we were constantly failing." ―Merve Emre, The Nation "Compelling . . . [Rose] has a dazzling imaginative range and is fluent in many disciplines . . . Rose is one of our most passionate and intuitive delvers, and she has brought back from the molten core of the deep dark places a fine book, another urgent feminist appeal for cultural change, before it is too late." ―Susan McKay, The Irish Times "Wide-ranging and incisive." ―Hannah Beckerman, The Guardian "Nuanced . . . Mothers is giving me another lens through which to think about individual and collective responsibility." Kika Sroka-Miller, The Bookseller "Rose is a fearless and erudite thinker . . . Thoroughly literary and bracing in its intensity, Rose's Mothers cannot be ignored." ― Booklist "[Rose] seeks to understand exactly what is being asked of mothers on a daily basis and to distill those demands into succinct causalities . . . For those readers interested not just in feminist theory, but also gender theory as it relates to parenting, this will be a rewarding reading experience. Clever, insightful essays on motherhood as 'the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings.'" ― Kirkus "Intellectually rigorous . . . Readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts will be drawn to Rose’s rumination." ― Publishers Weekly "Jacqueline Rose’s book tore me apart, reminding me of things I would rather forget . . . Rose [is] one of our very best cultural critics . . . The book excels in brilliant psychoanalytical readings on the ways that the interiority of motherhood is silenced . . . This is a book of pain, joy and brutality, a howl of anger." ―Suzanne Moore, The New Statesman (UK)

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (May 21 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 254 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374538476
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374538477
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 318 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 1.45 x 20.96 cm
• #668 in Marriage & Family
• #826 in Feminist Theory (Books)
• #1,124 in Literary Criticism & Theory

About the author

Jacqueline rose.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Jacqueline Rose: ‘I wanted to have a truer, more disturbing account of motherhood’

According to the novelist, mothers are punished whatever they do. She talks about trans parents, the male psyche and why Sheryl Sandberg’s advice for working mothers isn’t feasible

E veryone in the world has or has had one, yet our conception of what it is to be a mother is fatally flawed, argues Jacqueline Rose. The consequences of our devotion to that skewed vision are dire, ranging from a systemic hatred of single mothers, punished for perceived sexual and social irresponsibility, to an expectation of maternal perfection and joyfulness at damaging odds with the messy reality of birthing and raising children. Her book, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty , is, she tells me as we sit at the kitchen table of her north London flat, an attempt “to raise the ante and have a truer, more virulently exhilarating and disturbing account of motherhood in our general culture. That’s what the book’s trying to do; it’s trying to say, can we put this out there?”

It’s not all that Rose has put out there; this week, perhaps the most surprising Man Booker prize longlist ever has been published, and Rose is one of the judges. There are few big names, plenty of newcomers, and of the 13 books, one is a graphic novel and one a thriller. “In each case it felt as if our chosen novels were alerting us to something very hard to take on board but that we urgently needed to think about.”

“In such dire times, we urgently need the dissident, awkward, creative, voice of fiction,” Rose says. It’s not hard to detect her own interests in the list – exemplified in a lifetime of work that encompasses feminism, psychoanalysis, politics and literature but, she says of the judging process, “I found myself truly stretched.”

In Mothers , the “this” that she wants to get “out there” is multiple, complex, various. Even when Rose addresses apparently concrete social issues – such as the treatment of “maternity tourists” by the rightwing press, or the incidence of depression among working-class black women in post-apartheid South Africa – she is doing so in the knowledge that “behind any individual life of a mother, there are whole histories pressing on who she is and who she’s allowed to be”. In a profoundly moving final chapter, Rose writes about her maternal grandmother, whose family died in Chelmno concentration camp during the second world war, and the effect that it had on Rose’s own mother, who was “married off” when she was only 20 in order to fulfil her parents’ desire for their children’s settlement and security.

Of her childhood – she was born and grew up in London – Rose writes: “Every morning before we went to school, my sister and I, and eventually our younger sister, were expected to join in the ritual three-cloth cleansing of the entire home: wet, dry and methylated spirits. As I look back on it now, I don’t think, as she cleaned the house spotless, that my mother ever realised that there was nothing she needed to expiate, that she had not been the perpetrator – not ever, not now or in the distant past – of any crime.”

One of the most frequently recurring themes of the book, and indeed of our conversation, is Rose’s belief that mothers are required to perform a deeper, if not impossible, cleanup job; their unsolicited task is to preserve the fiction that the world is a safe place when, as she points out, “if anybody knows that’s rubbish, it’s a mother”.

Back in 1991, Rose published The Haunting of Sylvia Plath , in which she tore down the construction of Plath -as-icon, not least through the husbanding of her estate by her widower, Ted Hughes , and his sister, Olwyn; it was described by Elaine Showalter as “a stunning account” of the way Plath’s legacy was controlled.

Now, Rose says, when she thinks of that book, “what’s interesting is that I don’t discuss her as a mother, hardly at all, and I have to say I think that’s probably because I wasn’t one then”. She adopted her daughter, Mia, who is now 23, from China when she was seven and a half months old; as she and her then partner, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips , went through the process, her book on Plath must have felt like recent history.

Speaking now, Rose takes particular notice of the fact that Plath began her collection Ariel , published posthumously, with the poem “Morning Song” , and its opening line, “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”, about the experience of giving birth. She wanted, Rose notes, to end with the poems referred to as the Bee Sequence, and “Wintering” , the last word of which is “spring” – with, in between, “the darkness of shadows, as if she knows that to be a mother is to be in touch with what’s dark; if you want love to spring you’ve got to be in touch with darkness”. Hughes changed both the composition of the collection and its sequencing, in order, says Rose, “to make her death look poetically inevitable, and therefore destroys what she was doing around the discourse of mothering”.

The relationship between literary texts and psychoanalytic theory is at the heart of much of Rose’s work, finding expression in her abiding preoccupation with Proust, who crops up not only in non-fiction such as 2011’s Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East but also in her only novel, Albertine , which creates another life for the object of Proust’s hero’s obsession. It was published in 2002, the first book that Rose wrote after the death of her sister, the philosopher Gillian Rose, at the age of 48. “I didn’t feel I could write in an academic way,” she said in an interview in 2012. “It’s exhilarating and frightening letting the floodgates open.”

She has also written extensively – attracting some criticism – about the history and nature of Jewish nationalism, using the techniques of psychoanalysis to call for it to confront its fractured psyche. “You can feel her pain throbbing through these essays,” wrote the late Peter Preston in a review of her 2007 book The Last Resistance , which sought to track the evolution of Zionism to modern day Gaza.

Throughout her work beats the belief that to leave the mind and the heart (a word she uses frequently) unexamined is to store up immense and unstoppable trouble for yourself, and for others. She half-laughs when she tells me about an essay by the analyst and paediatrician DW Winnicott, written in 1949, in which he lists the 18 reasons a mother has to hate her baby. “My favourite one is: she hates him because she can neither eat him or have sex with him. Which is such a shocking thing to say even now! So one of the things that really struck me is that there’s all this either hostility to mothers, or the expectation that they will make the world perfect.”

Citing the example of Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work – “she was lambasted for it” – she says that women who do talk about “the immense equivocation and difficulty and psychic painfulness as well as joy of what it means to be a mother” are censured for drawing attention to anything approaching ambivalence. “It’s as if because mothers are in touch with the fraudulence of the things they’re being asked to do, then they’re hated.”

If Mothers is happy to delve into the past – both far distant, as Rose dissects different readings of Medea, and muses on the civic aspect of motherhood in ancient Greece, and more recent, through the work of, for example, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Ferrante and Roald Dahl – it is keenly aware of its responsibilities to the present. Rose believes that “feminism has realised that it can’t just talk about white, middle-class women. That’s a lesson that was hard-learned in the 70s and 80s, but if you’re thinking about mothers, you really can’t talk about them unless you talk about, for example, the fact that in America, the infant mortality rate for black babies is more than double what it is for white babies”.

Referring to the 54,000 women that, according to a 2015 report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, lose their jobs in the UK every year as a result of pregnancy, and of the obstacles put in the way of them fulfilling basic health maintenance such as antenatal appointments, Rose says: “I could not believe the virulence of the hatred. And that goes alongside all this saccharine idealisation of the mother as the protector of the child, who makes the world safe for the child, and who is good, and who is virtuous.”

Meanwhile, she argues, “there’s the experience, say, of giving birth. And of having a baby, which is at least a large part about mess, bodies, viscousness, mucus, shit, and then touching, holding, smelling, feeling. It’s about the most incredible range of busted boundaries around who we’re meant to think of ourselves as. And none of that mess is part of the public, official discourse on mothering.”

She remembers telling an academic colleague whose childcare arrangements sometimes fell through to bring her baby to work with her, not only so that she could make her working life possible, but so people could see what was involved. “When somebody like Sheryl Sandberg says ‘lean in’ ,” she notes drily, “and make your office demands even when you’re having a baby, she’s not actually envisaging babies in board meetings, right? Because what can’t be stood, in that official, sanctioned, rather phallic, clean environment, is mess, smell, dirt, nappies, unpredictability, noise.”

There are, of course, moments of joy, and of a more positive boundary-busting. When her adopted daughter was an infant, Rose found herself dozing off with her, “and waking up and thinking, the baby is lying on top of me, and then thinking, no, no, no, the baby’s inside you, that’s fine, go back to sleep. And then realising … that was really crazy and it gave me such pleasure. And it felt like she was really making a claim on me, and in me.”

I ask her how rapidly changing ideas of what constitutes a family – indeed, a mother – fit into her view of the future. In the book, she writes about Susan Stryker, a trans woman and activist who describes holding her female partner’s body as she gives birth, and the physical feelings, as well as the emotions, that the experience provoked in her. What she learned from Stryker, says Rose, “is that the moment of becoming a mother is about being connected with something different from what you are. Because you never know who’s arriving … There’s a radical strangeness at the heart of giving birth. And what Stryker does say is let’s just push this as far as it can go.”

She adds: “To answer your question simply, I feel that trans people are in touch with the peculiarity of what it means to make a gender distinction absolute and rigid, and therefore they’re in touch with the inherent strangeness of our sexual lives and that to give birth to someone is also to put you in touch with a kind of strangeness.”

Documenting all the complexities and injustices around motherhood is one thing; but how can they be changed?

Two things would have to alter radically, says Rose. “One is the male psyche would have to undergo something of a revolution in terms of the fear of the maternal body, because it is a reminder of neediness, dependence, fragility, everything that in our culture men are told they must not be.”

And the second, she argues, is that we would have to face “the poverty and immiseration” caused to vast swaths of people by austerity. “It doesn’t work; what’s incredible is that people go on voting for it, as if they buy into the super-ego lie that we must suffer and be on top of things, and there’s something appropriate about the very viciousness of the social system.” And implicated in this scenario, she adds, are mothers – the people to whom we look to heal and to soothe the ills of the world. “What I’m saying very crudely is that you have to be a socialist and a bit of a Freudian to stop offloading on mothers two utterly banal truths about being a human subject, which is that the world is unjust and our hearts and bodies are frail.”

• Society books
• Sylvia Plath
• Literary criticism

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

Advertisement

Supported by

Books of The Times

In a Raft of New Books, Motherhood From (Almost) Every Angle

By Parul Sehgal

• April 24, 2018
• Share full article

“There seems to be something about having the word ‘girl’ in the title of a book that guarantees huge sales.”

The critic Jacqueline Rose noted this trend in a 2015 review of the thrillers “Gone Girl” and “The Girl on the Train” — as well as a fashion, she said, for breezy misogyny sold to women as entertainment.

The girls are mostly gone now. It seems they’ve been replaced, improbably perhaps, by mothers, if this vertiginous pile of memoirs and novels on my desk is any indication. There is a sudden flurry of fascination with my people (full disclosure: a small, surly child thrashes in her sleep just to the right of that pile), and I’m not yet persuaded it’s an entirely positive development.

But first, the books — radiantly specific dispatches from almost every corner of motherhood. There are memoirs of sudden pregnancy (“And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready,” by Meaghan O’Connell) and struggling to conceive (“An Excellent Choice: Panic and Joy on My Solo Path to Motherhood,” by Emma Brockes); accounts of postpartum depression (“Things That Helped,” by Jessica Friedmann) and postpartum euphoria (“The Motherhood Affidavits,” by Laura Jean Baker); novels about whether to have children (“Motherhood,” by Sheila Heti), novels about mothering someone else’s children (“That Kind of Mother,” by Rumaan Alam), even novels about killing children (“The Perfect Nanny,” by Leila Slimani, and “The Perfect Mother,” by Aimee Molloy — part of a genre grouped under the ghastly moniker “mom thrillers” ).

And then there is Jacqueline Rose’s own new book, “Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty,” a sort of Rosetta Stone for the moment that examines the particular mix of fascination and dread that mothers engender.

Rose is a calm and stylish writer whose rangy essays in the London Review of Books on violence and identity, #MeToo, the trial of Oscar Pistorius and other subjects have become indispensable reading during the current reckoning around power and sexuality. She has written at length about Sylvia Plath, Hannah Arendt and Marilyn Monroe, as well as several books on Zionism and the conflict in the Middle East. Her specialties are personalities and philosophies that attract (sometimes court) extreme idealization and revulsion. These larger-than-life figures bear our projections and our fears, she says, and allow us to maintain a fantasy of innocence in our own lives.

How appropriate, then, is this turn to motherhood — that site in the culture “where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human,” Rose writes. “It is the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task — unrealizable, of course — of mothers to repair.”

These aren’t original points; this scapegoat argument in particular is one that has been made about every minority group you can imagine (it’s also the premise of Toni Morrison’s superb “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” ). But “Mothers” is a useful synthesis of and loving engagement with many of the writers who have shaped our thinking on motherhood — Morrison, Simone de Beauvoir and Adrienne Rich, whose unsurpassed “Of Woman Born” (1976) is a template for Rose. “Mothers” follows the same arc, arguing for the radical potentialities in motherhood, how women’s initiation into the relentless, often invisible labor of caretaking produces not the solipsistic, bourgeois creature of myth but something close to the ideal citizen — more responsive to the community and naturally inclusive.

Mothers “are not in flight from the anguish of what it means to be human,” Rose writes. She quotes Julia Kristeva: “To be a mother, to give birth, is to welcome a foreigner, which makes mothering simply ‘the most intense form of contact with the strangeness of the one close to us and of ourselves.’”

Isn’t it pretty to think so? Recent books on motherhood, however, frequently and sometimes unwittingly, illustrate a different phenomenon: how motherhood dissolves the border of the self but shores up, often violently, the walls between classes of women.

“Some problems we share as women, some we do not,” Audre Lorde wrote in an essay addressed to white feminists in 1984. “You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.”

Rose acknowledges this issue: “Solidarity among mothers, across class and ethnic boundaries, is not something Western cultures seem in any hurry to promote.” But so many of these books (almost all of them are by white, middle-class women) seem wary of, if not outright disinterested in, more deeply engaging with how race and class inflect the experience of motherhood. Thrillers and horror, the genres that serve as our cultural unconscious, are left to pick up the slack; “mom thrillers” so often hinge on the anxieties of child care and racial privilege.

These omissions are especially troubling because the rift between mothers is only growing. The fastest growing pay gap is between black women and white women. And research shows that regardless of class, black mothers and babies are more than twice as likely to die than their white counterparts — a gulf that has grown since slavery, and which researchers attribute to the lifelong stresses of enduring racism.

“Look at me,” the author of every new book on motherhood asks us. We should — and how could we not? Each testimony is valuable. But it’s with a strange pleasure that the reader will realize that so many of the taboos these writers hope to shatter — about the ambivalence of motherhood, for example — are, by now, familiar. The real work, the daring work, might be for these mothers to look at each other.

Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal .

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty By Jacqueline Rose 237 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

For more coverage of women and gender issues, subscribe to Gender Letter , a new newsletter.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

Don DeLillo’s fascination with terrorism, cults and mass culture’s weirder turns has given his work a prophetic air. Here are his essential books .

Jenny Erpenbeck’s “ Kairos ,” a novel about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won the International Booker Prize , the renowned award for fiction translated into English.

Kevin Kwan, the author of “Crazy Rich Asians,” left Singapore’s opulent, status-obsessed, upper crust when he was 11. He’s still writing about it .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty , by Jacqueline Rose, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2018, 237 pp.

• Book Review
• Published: 18 October 2019
• Volume 79 , pages 640–643, ( 2019 )

Cite this article

• Elaine P. Zickler PhD, LCSW 1  

411 Accesses

Explore all metrics

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Ferrante, E. (2016). Frantumaglia: A writer’s journey , trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

26 E. Oak Ave., Moorestown, NJ, 08057, USA

Elaine P. Zickler PhD, LCSW

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elaine P. Zickler PhD, LCSW .

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Zickler, E.P. Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty , by Jacqueline Rose, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2018, 237 pp.. Am J Psychoanal 79 , 640–643 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-019-09216-z

Download citation

Published : 18 October 2019

Issue Date : December 2019

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-019-09216-z

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

• Kindle Store
• Kindle eBooks
• Politics & Social Sciences

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty Kindle Edition

From one of the most important contemporary thinkers we have, a compelling, forceful tract about women and motherhood that demands immediate attention. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl's 'Matilda' to observations about motherhood in the ancient world, from and thoughts about the stigmatization of single mothers in the UK, Mothers delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice. A short, provocative work that considers how motherhood the object of intense ambivalence, of idealization and hatred-is the ultimate scapegoat for everything that is wrong with the world.

• Print length 243 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Faber & Faber
• Publication date April 17, 2018
• File size 1390 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

Popular titles by this author

Editorial Reviews

"Jacqueline Rose’s Mothers has already joined the canon of nonfiction books I hold most dear. This is in part because of the importance and luminous clarity of Rose’s argument, and in part because of the supremely intelligent and graceful prose in which she delivers it. Her writing here feels somehow both laser-focused in its analyses, and loose, roving, free. Her book distills a lifetime of psychoanalytic, literary, and political engagement into a fierce, generous study of human complexity―one which pushes us to reckon with the urgent question of how we might stop 'tearing mothers and the world to pieces.'" ―Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts "A sort of Rosetta Stone for the moment that examines the particular mix of fascination and dread that mothers engender . . . Rose is a calm and stylish writer whose rangy essays . . . have become indispensable reading during the current reckoning around power and sexuality." ―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Rose is, as ever, devastating in her elegance and striking in her ingenuity . . . Running throughout the book is the conviction that, in matters of both self and state, the boundaries between inside and outside are violent and blurred―a riddle for which mothers are the impossible key.” ―Tobi Haslett, Bookforum " Mothers is a passionate polemic . . . Rose's intellectual range is dazzling." ― The Economist "Dismantling the ideal is Jacqueline Rose’s purpose in Mothers . . . Searching always calmly and intelligently for reasons behind extreme feelings, Rose draws on a wide range of literary and philosophical sources." ―Ruth Scurr, The Times Literary Supplement (London) "As a literary scholar and psychoanalytic thinker, Rose has long insisted that we pay close attention to the subterranean fears, fantasies, and narratives that structure our most pressing sociopolitical problems . . . I was grateful to Rose for giving voice to [the] conflicted realities [of motherhood], for inviting her reader to acknowledge them without fear or shame . . . She had positioned herself as a mother to mothers, ready to soothe all of us who felt like we were constantly failing." ―Merve Emre, The Nation "Compelling . . . [Rose] has a dazzling imaginative range and is fluent in many disciplines . . . Rose is one of our most passionate and intuitive delvers, and she has brought back from the molten core of the deep dark places a fine book, another urgent feminist appeal for cultural change, before it is too late." ―Susan McKay, The Irish Times "Wide-ranging and incisive." ―Hannah Beckerman, The Guardian "Nuanced . . . Mothers is giving me another lens through which to think about individual and collective responsibility." Kika Sroka-Miller, The Bookseller "Rose is a fearless and erudite thinker . . . Thoroughly literary and bracing in its intensity, Rose's Mothers cannot be ignored." ― Booklist "[Rose] seeks to understand exactly what is being asked of mothers on a daily basis and to distill those demands into succinct causalities . . . For those readers interested not just in feminist theory, but also gender theory as it relates to parenting, this will be a rewarding reading experience. Clever, insightful essays on motherhood as 'the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings.'" ― Kirkus "Intellectually rigorous . . . Readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts will be drawn to Rose’s rumination." ― Publishers Weekly "Jacqueline Rose’s book tore me apart, reminding me of things I would rather forget . . . Rose [is] one of our very best cultural critics . . . The book excels in brilliant psychoanalytical readings on the ways that the interiority of motherhood is silenced . . . This is a book of pain, joy and brutality, a howl of anger." ―Suzanne Moore, The New Statesman (UK)

About the Author

Product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B078HKC88R
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Faber & Faber (April 17, 2018)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 17, 2018
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1390 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 243 pages
• #639 in Philosophy Criticism (Kindle Store)
• #2,605 in Feminist Theory (Kindle Store)
• #2,688 in Philosophy Criticism (Books)

About the author

Jacqueline rose.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

Report an issue

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices