This article discusses constructions and representations of motherhood in Russell Banks's The Darling and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document. It argues that the theme of motherhood has a long, if often overlooked, presence in American literature, and that the two novelists use the figure of the mother in order to engage with the themes of empathy and community. The novels participate in familiar postmodernist practices, such as multiple, fragmented viewpoints and narratives, unreliable narrators, non-chronological storytelling and the mingling of fact and fiction. However, they do not wholeheartedly embrace two key postmodern issues: irony and loss of affect. Instead, they seek to move away from some of the postmodern novel's more excessive decathecting tendencies, and they achieve that through their representations of mothers who, in not acquiescing to society's norms, challenge gender roles and cultural assumptions. The two fictional mothers under discussion share a past as Weather Underground activists, and in giving voice to them and refusing to demonize them as “bad” mothers, their creators also seek to expose other American narratives that reinforce dominant ideology and suppress the margins.

At the turn of the century, “Japan” was being imagined for the American public in a variety of ways. Sidney McCall, wife of Hegelian Ernest Fenollosa and close friend of Romanticist Lafcadio Hearn, sought a way to incorporate “Japan” into Fenollosa's broader Idealist arch while simultaneously preserving the titillation of Hearn's “ghostly tales.” By so doing, McCall attempted to reconcile divided notions of “femininity” in early Japanology (and American discourse at large). She utilized the form of the novel itself to work systematically through the schism between “feminine mystique” and “maternal feminism”; this uncertainty was resolved, for McCall, in her Idealist fictions from “Japan.”

As long ago as The Other America (1962), Michael Harrington asked, “How long shall we ignore this undeveloped nation in our midst? How long shall we look the other way while our fellow human beings suffer?”1 Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath brought into plain sight the plight of the poor, with Michael Brown, then director of FEMA, admitting sombrely at the Superdome that he was seeing people he never knew existed. The black poor were drawn forcefully into the national consciousness, for a while at least, as they had not been during the 2004 presidential election when it was discovered that many electronic voting machines had not found their way into New Orleans to register the votes of one of the largest blocs of African Americans.