She Does Not Mother Kevin Summary

She does not mother Kevin because of a strong love bond between them but out of a model that intensively pervades Western culture. She exposes with her attitude the constructedness of the maternal, making vivid the gap between aspiration and practice. Eva’s attempts to play the mother’s role generate an increasing awareness of mothering as an artificial performance, and of the child as an abstract concept that the reality often contradicts. Parenting emerges not as a natural ability but as a learned skill. Lacking any instinctual emotional connection to her son, Eva decides to follow the maternal role by the book, hoping that those fulfilling feelings will appear. Adapting to her new role, Eva exposes the constructedness of maternal love as integral to women’s identity emphasised by Badinter. Mother’s affection towards the child can be faked in order to conform to contemporary standards. Instead of rebelling against this fraud, she decides to perform her task dutifully until Thursday, hiding her feelings of mistrust and anger from her husband and her son. In trying to adhere to the role of good mother she turns in fact into a bad one. Being unable to love Kevin, she treats him as a stranger, according to useless models which cause great consternation as sites of maternal failure. Eva's mothering experience involves a daily if not hourly confrontation with her failure. Since Kevin behaves properly when he is with Franklin, her husband is lead to think that Eva does not like their son because he does not ‘square’ with her. Kevin does not seem to conform or
Eva find herself chained to a child she neither wants nor likes, and who appropriate every aspect of her life annihilating her. Eva ultimately embraces her chains, letting the constructedness of maternal role fall, but being still unable to reappropriate her previous