“A short story that wouldn’t work after the opening lines” : Frustrated Maternity in First-Person Narratives

Abstract

I propose to offer an analysis of two first-person narratives, one fictional— “Jackson Pollock’s Curtains” by Sue Hubbard (in her 2008 volume, Rothko’s Red)—and the other, a memoir by Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost(2003), in order to explore two contrasting ways of dealing with situations of frustrated maternity. The differences will be illustrated by looking at the formal characteristics of the two texts, by references to painting, especially in the case of Hubbard’s short story, and by relating them to two of the types of narratives of illness as proposed by Arthur W. Frank in his The Wounded Storyteller (1995), namely: “chaos narrative” and “quest narrative.”