Pressured to Enjoy. Articulating the ‘Dark' Sides of Parenthood in Dutch literary fiction from the 1980s onwards

Pressured to Enjoy

Articulating the ‘Dark' Sides of Parenthood in Dutch literary fiction from the 1980s onwards

Josje Weusten (e-mail)
Universiteit Maastricht
Centre for Gender and Diversity

My research concerns a contextual study of representations of the ‘dark' sides of parenthood in Dutch literary fiction from 1980 onwards.

The starting point of this research project is the observation that parenthood in the Netherlands has been frequently represented as a pleasurable and individually satisfactory experience since the 1980s (see amongst others Wubs, 2004¹). Moreover, this ideal of enjoyment is a white middle-class norm. The origin of this norm of enjoyment can be traced back to a number of social developments, among them the introduction of the pill in the 1960s, the second feminist wave of the 1970s, transformations of the intimate sphere, demographic shifts and the increasing emphasis on individual freedom of choice in politics and society as a whole in the 1980s. From this period onwards, the interplay of these developments has led to a widespread acceptance of the notion that parenthood is a free and individual choice. In this context parents are obliged to justify their choice. Why have children when they are no longer the inevitable consequence of sex and, moreover, when they are costing financially? In those circumstances children must have an added value that is intrinsic: they are simply fun! The representation of parenthood as a conscious and planned choice, which is steeped in enjoyment, is interpreted as a social discourse in this research project. The media, advertisements, consumption and domestic life, health care, educational advice, leisure culture and the ways in which people talk about ‘taking' and having children shape this discourse. The latter has normative effects.

Nonetheless, the darker sides of parenthood are also expressed abundantly in several places, among which literary fiction. This offers an interesting field of tension, which begs the question of how the dark sides of bearing and having children are expressed in literary fiction in relation to this quite dominant norm of enjoyment. The main aim of my research is henceforth to unravel the ways in which the less pleasurable aspects of parenthood are articulated in relation to the ‘conscious parenthood equals enjoyment' discourse. In order to answer the main research question I will unravel the discourse of enjoyment itself in more detail, map the field of literary articulations via database-analyses, and make a contextual analysis of a selection of literary sources in which the dark sides are expressed.

The main research questions thus are:

What are the characteristics of the normative discourse about conscious, successful and happy parenthood? Where does it circulate? What are its origins and how has it developed?
How are the ‘dark' sides of parenthood articulated in literary works published in The Netherlands since the 1980s?
How do these articulations relate to each other and to a normative discourse about conscious, successful and happy parenthood?

Methodology

Because of the strong interdisciplinary approach combining sociological research with literary analysis, I will mobilize and integrate methods from different disciplines.
I will among other things make use of discourse analysis, semiotics and several narrative methods, such as narratology, intertextual analysis and rhetorical analysis. In the analysis I will pay special attention to and focus upon relevant diversity; especially on the role gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality (and possibly generation) play in the construction of images of parenthood in the discourse about conscious, successful and happy parenthood and the different literary sources at hand. The exclusion or inclusion mechanisms of discourses on parenthood have namely been shown often to work through a homogenizing stance towards gender, class, sexuality en ethnicity. Social and medical-psychological discussions of parenthood often focus merely on the middle class, on motherhood and are based on an assumed ‘natural' heterosexuality and a ‘natural' idea of whiteness. Besides, there has been insufficient attention for the role of gender in research on parenthood, in the sense that motherhood and fatherhood are often studied as separate entities. It is, however, fruitful to study them together as this makes it possible to find out how they (re)constitute each other.

¹Wubs, J. M. (2004). Luisteren naar deskundigen. Opvoedingsadvies aan Nederlandse ouders 1945-1999. Assen: Van Gorcum