In this paper, I explore transgressive, unsettled, and conflicted images of motherhood in domestic noir fiction. I argue that domestic noir has the capacity to represent complex female psychology by avoiding reductive character tropes such as the ‘villain’, and refuting what academic Eva Burke calls the ‘social obligation of female likeability’.

The image of a ‘bad’ mother remains culturally challenging unless she is perceived as belonging to an underprivileged socio-economic demographic – or mad. In this way, bad mothers become ‘othered’ and judged according to familiar social and cultural ideas. Focusing on the relationship between ‘madness’ and badness, I will ask; why should complex female psychology and emotions, including anger and aggressivity, be continually framed as ‘mad’, bad and dangerous, and what does this mean for fictional representations of motherhood?

Contemporary domestic noir fiction foregrounds what novelist Harriet Lane calls the ‘everyday horrors’ of dysfunctional ordinary life. These novels prioritise the potentially powerful figure of the antiheroine, often in the form of the unreliable, unlikeable narrator. Problems arise when this character is portrayed as unstable or psychopathological, as in bestsellers Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, both of which explore ideas about madness in relation to motherhood. By contrast, novels including Her and Alys Always by Harriet Lane, What We Did by Christabel Kent, A Good Enough Mother by Bev Thomas, and Little Darlings by Melanie Golding explore the troubled psychologies of motherhood in female characters who are navigating moral and ethical challenges, as opposed to ‘madness’.

In her novel Lo spazio bianco (The White Space, 2008), Italian author Valeria Parrella tells the story of a new mother and of her tragic wait while her newborn child is in NICU, suspended between life and death. Parrella describes this liminal space as a ‘white space’, where the liminality is not just between the child’s survival and his probable death, but also between two identities: that of the woman before pregnancy and delivery, and that of the mother she is going to become. This shift in identity is problematic: when will the main character become a mother? Will she lose that status if the child passes away? And, most importantly, what happens to the woman and her perception of self while she is relegated in the ‘white space’? Similar questions have been addressed by Irish author Emilie Pine, both in some of the essays published in Notes to Self (2018) and in the novel Ruth and Pen (2022). By comparing the works by Parrella and Pine and their different representation of motherhood, and with the support of psychoanalytic literary theory, this paper explores the way in which female writers deal with the representation of self in relation to motherhood, and the way in which death (or the hypothesis of death) shapes it.

Culturally, new mothers are trained to treat "baby blues" and tiredness as part of 'becoming-mother'. When their physiological distress is interpreted as symptomatic of a mental disorder—most commonly as postpartum depression (PPD)—the focus often turns to women's bodies and not the social circumstances. Just as mental illnesses are treated as brain disorders—as if chemical imbalance alone can account for psychological distress—symptoms of post-natal depression in new mothers are regarded as a 'personal' problem. By relying solely on scientific explication and erasing women's voices from the scientific archive, the biomedical community inflicts 'epistemic injustice' (following Miranda Fricker) on women, calling into question their role as knowers of their bodies. By attending to the objective body, and not taking into account the lived body, such detached forms of knowledge-making fuel stereotypes about motherhood and the challenges associated with it, both within the medical community and society at large. Conversely, narratives of motherhood, written by new mothers in the first-person register, act as counter-narratives to the medical narrative. To show this, I will examine Teresa Wong's Dear Scarlet, a graphic memoir about postpartum depression. I wish to suggest that Wong's memoir functions as an archive of her affective, emotional and embodied experience of motherhood, in which she chronicles her struggle against cultural narratives and metaphors of a 'good mother'. By locating the text within the critical medical humanities, Wong's memoir can be seen as laying a critique against Western biomedicine by foregrounding questions related to authority, caregiving, medical ethics and gendered violence.

Historical fiction has long been a medium for feminist re-imaginings of women’s history. In Sweden, writers such as Kerstin Ekman and Sara Lidman have written about historical events from a female perspective, and gained a large following as well as critical acclaim for their work. These writers are well known and present in feminist research (Schottenius 1992, Bränström Öhman 2008, Brantly 2017, Grahn 2022). Other works of historical fiction, such as historical romance and other kinds of popular fiction, have gained less academic attention. However, it is one of the major ways in which women interact with the historical past (de Groot 2016).

This paper will explore maternal narratives in the works of Alice Lyttkens (1897—1991), an author who once was one of the most read in Sweden (Waern 1983, Heggestad 2009), but who is now largely forgotten. She wrote several book series of historical novels, mainly taking place during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. They all center around one or a few female characters, often in the same family. The study will comprise of quantitative analysis of six series of novels, focusing on a few motifs such as pregnancy, childbirth, and inheritance. What kind of historical past is Lyttkens depicting? How is motherhood presented, and how is it connected to women’s historical situation? Examining these texts together provides an insight to the use and representation of women’s history in popular fiction, spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s.