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British Association for American Studies ☰

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Marika Ceschia

Marika Ceschia is a final year PhD student in the School of English at the University of Leeds, and her thesis examines African-American womenÕs writing of the 1970s and 1980s, focusing in particular on portrayals of motherhood. She completed an MA in Postcolonial and World Literatures at Maynooth University, Ireland, and a BA in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Udine, Italy. She has presented papers at the BAAS PGR symposium, at SASA annual conferences, and at the UCL center for research on the Americas. Her research interests include postcolonial theory and literature, Native American and Chicano literature, gender and queer studies, and critical race theory.

Willa’s Maternal Ethics of Care in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills

By | Published March 3, 2022

Literature PGBAAS21 Research

  This article is adapted from a presentation given at BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, 4th December 2021. Among the many subplots in Gloria Naylor’s 1985 novel Linden Hills is the story of Willa, who finds herself imprisoned in the basement of her house with her son because her husband, Luther Needed, is convinced the child is not his. After the child dies and she prepares his body for a funeral, she unearths the forgotten stories of the previous Mrs. Neededs. Portraying Willa’s mourning practice, based upon a responsiveness to the needs of others and an understanding of autonomy as a capacity to reshape and cultivate new modes of relations, or what I term her ‘maternal ethics of care,’ Naylor’s novel not only humanizes black lives. [i]  It also rewrites our ‘genre-specific’ (i.e., Western bourgeoise) narrative of the human as a bio-economic subject, providing a way to unthink the ontological constraints that […]