the problematics of motherhood in twentieth century women's fiction

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Tale. Surfacing and The Edible Woman, Beatrice Culleton's In
Search of April Raintree, Margaret Clarke's The Cutting
Season and Gabrielle Roy's The Windflower
1.9.0. In Afro-Amerlcan literature, the image of the
black woman as mammy persisted beyond the Clvil War into the
lrterature of the 1890s The black woman's tendency to see
maternal dutles as natural and sacred must have reinforced
the Southern planters' notlon that black women were
perfectly sulted to be mammles Even as the planters
pralsed the black woman as the 'contented mammy', they
inSrSte3 that she neglect her own children. Qulte
paradoxlcally, the whxte planters relegated the dutles of
motherhood to a belng whom they considered 'subhuman', thus
creating a llne of demarcation between the spiritual and
physlcal aspects of motherhood
1.9.1. In contemporary Afro-Amerlcan women's flctlon, the
black mother is no longer seen as a breeder, concubme,
sapphire, mammy or mule, nor 1s she exalted to the status of
the saviour or madonna As Marl Evans points out, the black
women "braved the ideological strictures of the slxtles and
freed themselves from the roies assigned to them rn the
wrltlngs of thelr male counterparts, where, deplcted as
queens and princesses, or as Earth mo~hers andJideallzed Big
Mommas of super human wlsdom and strength, they were