Institutionalizing Maternity: The Treatment of Mothers with Mental Illness in Contemporary Novels for Children

Children's literature has a generic narrative structure in which child protagonists develop their subjectivity and maturity. When this generic tradition meets new representational agendas for social justice and inclusivity in stories that respond to real-world issues like mental disability and mental illness, however, such child agency comes at a politically charged price. Sarah Weeks's So B. It (2005), Martine Leavitt's Heck Superhero (2004), and Gwyneth Rees's My Mum's from Planet Pluto (2004) all nanativize situations in which children are required to cope with the intellectual and rational absenteeism of mothers with either a mental disability or mental illness. In each case, disadvantage is heightened, given that these women are written into a world in which patriarchy still dominates conceptions, and (in many respects) treatments, of mental illness as part of the longer intellectual tradition stemming from psychoanalytic theory. Using an admixture of disability and gender politics, this article argues that mental disability and illness are maternalized within these novels for children, and that these novels reinforce, rather than redress, normative, medicalized, and patriarchal constructions of mental illness or disability as a flaw or a lack.