Spectral motherhood and maternal grieving: language and sudden unexplained death in infancy in Australian juvenile fiction

Written by adults for children, children's literature plays a significant role in shaping readers' identities and worldviews, including those relating to gender and death. In two Australian children's novels, The Shape (2000) by Diane Bates and The Naming of Tishkin Silk (2003) by Glenda Millard, the generic depiction of motherhood meets new representational agendas relating to sudden unexplained death in infancy and grieving at a politically charged price. Primarily drawing on an Irigarayian theory relating to motherhood, and patriarchal language and discourse, this paper argues that the depressed mothers in these two novels function as spectral figures, whose absent presence and present absence haunt both the child protagonists and the texts. Moreover, the fictional mothers' healing is dependent on their relationship to their surviving children, which ensures that ideologies of motherhood are contained within patriarchal discourses in these texts for children.