This presentation explores maternal ethics as portrayed in the Greek author Plutarch's Parallel Lives. By critically analyzing the historical examples of motherhood selected and represented in Lives, the study posits that Plutarch constructs a distinctive paradigm of the exceptional mother who transcends the conventional constraints imposed upon women in Classical and Hellenistic Greece. The presentation further argues that Plutarch’s pronounced emphasis on the maternal role in the cultivation and education of sons may not merely mirror but occasionally surpass the father's influence, ultimately determining the future trajectory of the state.

However, this paper also uncovers a disconcerting dichotomy in Plutarch’s treatment of mothers of sons in contrast to mothers of daughters, the latter of whom are frequently relegated to the status of courtesans. It highlights Plutarch’s foundational ethics of motherhood, emphasizing the profound impact of mothers in shaping their sons, thereby inspiring heroic feats and fostering societal improvement. Although Plutarch acknowledges the deep bond between mothers and daughters elsewhere in his authorship, the Lives predominantly depict these relationships as mere economic transactions.

The novels of contemporary Goncourt prize-winning French writer Marie NDiaye contain many mothers. The reader is normally given access to their consciousness but that is never a comfortable place to be. It is hard to receive NDiaye’s mothers as attractive figures. They are inadequate or abusive, they prioritise their career over their child, and a desire to be free of the children to whom they have given birth, and to sometimes apparently actually become so, features in all the maternal narratives.

Woven into NDiaye’s representations of motherhood are its two extreme reference points, the perfection of the Madonna and the monstrosity of Medea. This paper explains how the ideal of the Madonna, first expressly invoked in her 2001 novel, Rosie Carpe, contains within itself the very tensions that lead to maternal failure. It goes on to explore her 2021 novel, La vengeance m’appartient, in which the Medea figure, present but often veiled in the earlier novels, is explicitly recreated and forensically investigated. In this novel the fears and fantasies of earlier mother figures are given concrete expression in the murder of a mother’s three children.

I argue that in her subtle deconstruction of these referential figures, NDiaye reveals how each is contained in the other and how, despite the reluctance of her texts to depict the traditional view of a mother, as loving, devoted and protective, NDiaye approaches a frighteningly real representation of the mother, in the act of mothering.

The paper focuses on representations of maternal experience in contemporary Latvian literature through analysis of Daina Tabūna's short story “Viena diena tavā dzīvē 11.09.2020” (One day in your life 11.09.2020, 2020) and Anna Auziņa's novel Mājoklis. Terēzes dienasgrāmata (The Dwelling. Teresa’s Diary, 2021). Tabūna's story, made up of concentrated notes depicting 24 hours in the life of a woman who has given birth to her first child, portrays the routinised, stifling everyday experience of taking care of another human being. Evoking the constant demands the infant makes on the mother and exposing the reciprocity of mother and the child, the story explores ambivalent maternal feelings of care, confusion, fatigue and affection. The protagonist of Auziņa's novel decides to have her third baby amidst the pain and suffering caused by the aging, illness and death of her parents. By focusing on the subjective and embodied experience of pregnancy and birth, Auziņa challenges the previous taboo of talking about the maternal body. Both texts are characterized by blurring of genres: turning to the autofictional mode, the authors fictionalize their own experiences of motherhood as affectively embodied. My goal is to examine these representations of motherhood within a broader context of recent literary research on matrifocal narratives (Rye et al. 2018, Podnieks 2020, Henriksson et al. 2023) and to shed light on the ways in which the texts, discussed in the paper, relate to cultural scripts about motherhood, but also critique and problematize them.

The current paper analyzes some of the connotations of maternity in the modern Romanian novel. The literary texts proposed for this study are Romanian novels written by two ideologically opposite women writers: Sofia Nădejde (who lived between 1856-1946), a feminist and socialist activist, and Hortensia Papadat Bengescu (who lived between 1876-1955), as one of the most appreciated authors who belonged to the established and influential literary group that marked the Romanian literary modernism during the Inter-war period. This paper will research on the role of maternity in the context of establishing the “new modern mother” in the Romanian novel. The replacement of the traditional mother with the urban bourgeois mother constitutes a major shift in the economy of social and familial relationships. Thus, I explore three important aspects of „modern motherhood”: maternity as a matrimonial transaction; domestic oppression and social pressure; and, lastly, the way women face involuntary maternity, abortion, and miscarriages. Depicting the rough experience of maternity as a particular case of women’s exploitation through imposed maternity and birth control exerted in a patriarchal society, as it is represented in Nădejde’s novel, is complementary to motherhood in a bourgeois society where maternity is objectified, as revealed in H.P. Bengescu’s novel, while women are merely an object of transaction meant to reinforce men’s social status and symbolic power. This study proposes to reflect on how both novels represent maternity as an experience which occurs outside of the women’s agency.