Expressing milk: Representing breastfeeding in contemporary American literature (Toni Morrison, Sherley Ann Williams, Nalo Hopkinson, Louise Erdrich, Laura Esquivel)

This dissertation explores the challenge that the breastfeeding protagonist and the practice of breastfeeding offer to the American narrative of the independent, unencumbered hero. In each of the multicultural texts considered here, all of which are set outside of the present age of mass-produced feeding bottles and reliable breastmilk substitutes, the material aspects of an ongoing breastfeeding relationship shape and are central to the plot. In their novels, contemporary authors Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Nato Hopkinson, Louise Erdrich, and Laura Esquivel incorporate the interactive practice of breastfeeding in ways that complicate ideas of freedom in a context of slavery, dramatize tensions between embodied motherhood and women's claims for liberation, and contest idealized American concepts of independence that rely on notions of individual autonomy. A definition of freedom as autonomous independence fails to account for material connections to one's child, as Morrison suggests in Beloved, or for the inherent dependence of an infant, as portrayed in Williams' Dessa Rose. Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring also supports an alternate figuration of the individual, contrasting an ideal of unencumbered independence with the heroine's interdependence within family, state, and community. Similarly, Erdrich's The Antelope Wife and Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) privilege ontologies based on intersubjectivity over contemporary scientific and medical narratives of bodies as autonomous entities when they portray nonmaternal characters---a white male soldier in one case and a virgin aunt in the other---whose bodies respond by producing milk to save the lives of the infants in their care. Through its attention to the physical and physiological conflicts of breastfeeding relationships in these stories, and by considering but looking beyond the symbolic to the material and literal aspects of breastfeeding, this dissertation contributes to recent scholarly efforts to reconceive and re-present the complexities of motherhood.