Each of the stories you’ve read explores the struggles of motherhood. The protagonists’ situations and struggles are quite different, but in each case we learn how the characters come up against the idealized mother (our culture’s and the one they’ve internalized) and suffer in not meeting those ideals. Keep in mind that these characters are not real people; they are fictions, created by the authors to express ideas and feelings about motherhood. Your task in writing this essay is to examine what those ideas are. How do the plots (storylines), the narration (first and third person), the writing style, the symbols, and the characterization, express the writer’s ideas? What are those ideas? In other words, what is each of the writers saying about motherhood through her story? The introduction should present the issue of motherhood in broad strokes: what are the “issues” around motherhood (consider the articles you’ve read) and what do the stories tell us about contemporary American motherhood? It should end with a clear thesis (interpretive) statement that answers those questions. You might comment on how the ideas that emerge from the stories (as opposed to the stories themselves) differ or how they are similar. Titles and authors of the stories should be given here, but you should not quote.
