Defining motherhood : three Canadian short stories

The chosen selection of Canadian short stories – Craig Boyko's "The Baby" and Clea Young's "Split", both published in the Journey Prize Stories 2006, and Zsuzsi Gartner's "Pest Control for DummiesTM", published in the collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth (2000) – deals with the theme of motherhood through various examinations of the personal identities of, mostly, female characters. Namely, this selection explicitly deals with skepticism about prevalent traditions and the diverse body of themes pertaining to what is nowadays known as motherhood studies. The primary focus of the paper is to examine how the culturally constructed concept of motherhood, as inseparable from the concept of womanhood, affects individual female identity. Additionally, the paper investigates how three different authors, incidentally in the same collection of short stories, treat the discourse on motherhood.

La sélection choisie des nouvelles canadiennes, « The Baby » (Craig Boyko), « Pest Control for DummiesTM » (Zsuzsi Gartner) et « Split » (Clea Young), traite le thème de la maternité à travers des divers examens d'identités personnelles, principalement des personnages féminins. A savoir, il traite explicitement du scepticisme à propos des traditions dominantes et de la diversité des thèmes différents à ce que l'on appelle aujourd'hui les études sur la maternité. L'objectif principal de l'article est d'examiner comment le concept de la maternité, culturellement construit, comme une partie inséparable du concept de la féminité, affecte l'identité féminine individuelle.