A Plea for Motherhood: Mothering and Writing in Contemporary Norwegian Literature

Abstract

In 2018 several well-established female Norwegian novelists—Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold, Heidi Furre, Inger Bråtveit and Monica Isakstuen—produced fiction with mothers as narrators and protagonists. This chapter explores the issues that their texts address, as well as the narrative strategies they use. Although the novels look quite like popular motherhood memoirs where mothers describe their daily efforts to manage the situation at home, I show that the refined aesthetic texts by these Norwegian authors in fact contain what I call a plea for motherhood. Further, all four novels explore the relationship between writing and mothering. Ultimately, I argue that the novels by Skomsvold, Furre, Bråtveit and Isakstuen need to be read against the background of the situation in Norway, where it is taken for granted that women want a career, but motherhood is generally left without comment. The narrators in the 2018 novels seem motivated not only by the need to defend motherhood against feminist attacks on motherhood but also in resistance against other discourses, including political pro-natalism and literary-critical dismissal of motherhood as a literary subject. By merging fragments, essayistic pieces, memories and reflections, the novels point to a new way of delineating the multi-layered experience of motherhood.