FE/MALE MOTHER OF TWO: GENDER AND MOTHERHOOD IN LIONEL SHRIVER’S WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN AMY SMIALEK Bachelor of Arts in English: Literature and Language Arts Baldwin-Wallace College December 2004 Submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH at the CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY Spring 2016 We hereby approve this thesis for Amy Smialek Candidate for the Master of Arts in English degree Department of English and CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY’S College of Graduate Studies by ____________________________________________ Professor Rachel Carnell, Chairperson of the Committee English Department April 11, 2016 ____________________________________________ Professor Adam Sonstegard, Committee Member English Department April 11, 2016 ____________________________________________ Professor James Marino, Committee Member English Department April 11, 2016 December 7, 2015 FE/MALE MOTHER OF TWO: GENDER AND MOTHERHOOD IN LIONEL SHRIVER’S WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN AMY SMIALEK ABSTRACT There are critical reviews regarding Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin that discuss many controversial topics in the novel. Of these reviews, most critics limit their arguments to the taboo topics of American school shootings and Eva’s character as an ostensibly ambivalent mother. Unfortunately, there is little academic criticism on Shriver’s most recognized novel and, among such analyses, two of Shriver’s most crucial depictions are overlooked. Firstly, readers must acknowledge the impact that contemporary American society has on females and mothers. This novel shows how much a culture relies on societal “rules” that govern human expectations. Secondly, Shriver’s character of Celia is often overlooked. Without taking Celia into account, Eva cannot be fully analyzed as a mother. Eva’s character can be defined as a conventional and unconventional female. We should also recognize Celia’s importance, as well as the significance of each child’s reaction when identifying Eva’s conventional and unconventional mothering tactics. As I demonstrate, Eva is not an ambivalent mother, even though society labels her as such. Shriver suggests that how a person mothers a particular child is influenced by that individual child’s reaction to that style of mothering. Kevin responds more agreeably to Eva’s unconventional mothering, while Celia flourishes with Eva’s conventional mothering. For Shriver, contemporary society defines and critiques our expectations for gender and motherhood. Since Shriver’s protagonist is both a female and a mother, Shriver suggests that the character of iii Eva must endure more scrutiny from society. Ultimately, Shriver depicts a society that makes us do, say, and think the absurd, like condemning a mother for her teenager’s murderous acts. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………..….iii CHAPTERS I INTRODUCTION….............................................................................................1 II CRITICAL DISCOURSE………………………………..………….………….6 III BUTLERIAN THEORY……………………………………………..……….22 IV GENDER……………………………………………………….………….....33 4.1 Conventional Gender…………………………………….……….33 4.1.1 Epistolary Format ………………………………..………33 4.1.2 Male-Dependency ……………………………….………41 4.1.3 Anti-Boy/Menace ……………………………..…………44 4.2 Unconventional Gender…………………………….……………48 4.2.1 Epistolary Format ……………………………..…….…...48 4.2.2 Queering Gender …………………………….…………..53 4.2.3 Last Name …………………………………….…………59 V MOTHERHOOD……….………………………………………….…………63 5.1 Conventional Motherhood………………………………..………63 5.1.1 Celia’s Conventional Mother ………………….…..…….63 5.1.2 Kevin’s Conventional Mother…………………..………..68 5.2 Unconventional Motherhood……………………………..………74 5.2.1 Celia’s Unconventional Mother ………………….……...74 5.2.2 Kevin’s Unconventional Mother…………………..……79 VI CONCLUSION………………………………………………………..……..89 v WORKS CITED…………………………………………………….…...………………95 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Lionel Shriver undercuts stereotypes regarding gender and motherhood through her character Eva Khatchadourian in her 2003 novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin. This novel, like many of Shriver’s works, addresses taboos, and the taboos in Kevin include American school shootings and maternal ambivalence. Although the issue of American school shootings is advertised on the jacket of Shriver’s novel, the hidden or secret taboo that most readers identify next is that Shriver’s narrator, Eva, is a “delinquent” mother, concluding that Eva is to blame for Kevin’s wrongdoings, even though Eva declares her innocence at the end of the novel in her final letter to her dead husband. Yet, just because readers focus on Shriver’s inclusion of Eva’s ambivalent moments as a mother, I would like to adjust that focus to concentrate on the many maternal efforts Eva puts forth with Kevin, and to also prove her innocence regarding Thursday. Readers, critics, and reviewers, along with theorists of gender and motherhood studies, discuss school shootings and Eva’s less-than-perfect mothering choices of her firstborn, yet ignore most of Shriver’s depictions about the impossible societal expectations for gender and motherhood, as well as the paradoxical demeanors of Eva’s two children, and the solid defense for Eva as an incredible mother to a problematic child in contemporary America. 1 Shriver crafts Kevin as an epistolary novel; Eva Khatchadourian, an Armenian- American, writes letters to her dead American husband, Franklin Plaskett. Though ostensibly written over a six-month period, the content within these letters covers twenty years of Eva’s marriage to Franklin. Through these letters, Shriver’s Eva often reveals her difficulty in liking their peculiar son, Kevin; Kevin chooses to reveal and conceal certain sides of himself to either parent, and Eva tends to write about the malicious side of Kevin, which she sees more than Franklin ever did. Eva attempts countless conventional tactics while mothering Kevin, but he is not a conventional child, and so these efforts of hers end up ineffectual. Yet, Eva’s conventional maternal efforts with Celia, Franklin and her second child, work out effortlessly since Celia acts like a more “normal” child and reacts conventionally to Eva’s conventional mothering. Shriver clearly shows that a mother needs to use a mothering style that is appropriate for each individual child. If the children differ in deportment, so should the mother differ in her approaches with mothering them. Eva’s letters which include information about the fictional civil suit against Eva, pertaining to her “defects” in raising Kevin, clearly thematize Eva’s self-reflection of her “guilt” throughout the novel. Leading up to the day of Kevin’s school shootings (which Shriver has Eva refer to as Thursday), Shriver’s Eva thoroughly examines her own self, as well as her relationship with Kevin, through her letters to her dead husband. Even though parenting in contemporary America has evolved, Shriver chose a traditional model of a married male and female couple thus emphasizing societal expectations of what a female mother should be, say, and do within the family. Through the novel, Shriver makes it clear that those who follow traditional parenting structures will be judged according to traditional 2 roles and impossible standards. Shriver suggests that this traditional gender role in the family construct is more probable to be critiqued if a child misbehaves. I use the term female mother to emphasize the doubled weight of societal criticism Eva’s character has to endure throughout Shriver’s novel. Shriver’s Eva notes her “failures” as a mother when she matches up her efforts to societal expectations of motherhood, which causes her to echo the social construct of female guilt. Yet, readers come to find that Shriver’s Eva believes that she is not to blame for Kevin’s horrible actions throughout his life, including Thursday. Shriver suggests to contemporary female mothers that, even though there are plenty of cultural tendencies to blame an upper-middle-class mother for her offspring’s errors, the mother should not be blamed by others, or herself, just because society and culture see such maternal blame to be the fitting explanation in contemporary America. To most readers, Eva primarily conveys internal conflict regarding her relationship with Kevin among the first twenty-six letters of the twenty-eight-letter novel. She reflects, while writing to posthumous Franklin, on the countless times she felt guilty as Kevin’s mother. These “guilty” feelings match up to Eva’s mind echoing society’s desire for the “perfect” mother. When Eva did not agree that she was society’s definition of the “perfect” mother, she assumed it was guilt, when it really was her falling into this cultural impression of contemporary maternal guilt. After Thursday, more amiable emotions between Eva and Kevin are unmistakably identified, especially in the final chapter of the novel. Yet, most critics ignore the warm moments and friendly connections between Eva and Kevin within the first twenty-six chapters. One connection of mother and son is discussed through Eva’s letter about Kevin’s approval of Eva when she 3 returned one of his computer virus files she took from his bedroom. Once Kevin realized that Eva understood why he collected them, Kevin offered Eva, “‘You know, if there’s anybody you don’t like…And you got their e-mail address? Just lemme know…Better warn them you got friends in low places’” (326-7) and Eva took this in, believing that “this is bonding!” with Kevin (327) since a conventional relationship does not work with her unique son. Another mother-son understanding that Eva writes to her dead husband about is when she does not give Mrs. Mary Woolford any sympathy for Kevin calling her anorexic daughter fat. Eva realized then that, if she followed Mary’s request to scold Kevin for doing so, that “‘the consequences of [her] daughter at school will be even worse’” (Kevin 302). Eva predicts that Kevin would tease Laura even more if he knew that Laura told her mom, and that her mom told his mom, since Eva recognized this pattern from Kevin’s past situations. Here, Eva reveals an understanding of her strange child, and proves that conventional parenting methods do not work with him, as they only make situations worse. Clearly, the connections Eva includes in her letters to Franklin that have to do with her getting along with Kevin, are not characterized as conventional mother-child relationships according to Eva and society, but this is Shriver’s way of depicting unconventional motherhood, as well as unconventional children. Eva believes that “it must be possible to earn a devotion by testing an antagonism to its very limit, to bring people closer through the very act of pushing them away” (400). Once these connections are detected, we then learn that Shriver’s Eva does not always fit into conventional categories including gender and motherhood, but challenges them in her letters to her 4