Marxist Criticism In The Mother By Gwendolyn Brooks

“The Mother” is a poem written by Gwendolyn Brooks that is about the complexity and controversy of abortions. I have previously analyzed through a new critical lens and discovered that its meaning was to show how a woman can still be a mother, even if she does not give birth to her child. Upon closer reading, using the techniques of marxist and psychoanalytic critics, we see the poem evolve in its connotation. A marxist critic could read this work and see a women who 's social standing could have prompted her to abort her child. On the other hand, a psychoanalyst would see this poem as a multitude of defences on the part of the woman as to why she had an abortion. In marxist criticism, emphasis is placed on social structures, history and ideologies. In “The Mother”, we can use marxism to explore how the social class of the mother in this poem has impacted her decision to abort her child. From reading in the first stanza “The singers and …show more content…
While this criticism focuses on our subconscious and Freudian teachings, we still see some of these coming into play during this poem. The most prominent of the methods used in psychoanalysis in this poem are defence mechanisms. The first mechanism the mother in this poem uses is intellectualization. This is seen when the mother says “Since anyhow you are dead. / Or rather, or instead / You were never made” (24-26). While after reading the full poem, we know that she does have some feeling that her unborn children had lives or at least souls. However, by saying out loud they never existed at all is her of justifying to herself that she made the right decision. This line can also be seen as her being in denial. She titters between believing they had lives and them not, but ultimately, when she denies her child’s life its mostly her trying to spare herself the immense guilt and pain that would be associated with accepting the consequences of