The Cost of an Insincere Performance: Motherhood and Punishment in<i> Revolutionary Road, The Hours, </i>and<i> We Need to Talk About Kevin</i>

<p dir="ltr">This essay examines Richard Yates’ <i>Revolutionary Road </i>(1961), Michael Cunningham’s <i>The Hours </i>(1998), and Lionel Shriver’s <i>We Need to Talk About Kevin </i>(2003) through the application of Adrienne Rich’s concept of maternal altruism and Michel Foucault’s <i>Discipline and Punish </i>(1975)<i> </i>and <i>Technologies of the Self </i>(1988). I argue that the aforementioned novels destabilise and subvert mythologies of motherhood and the nuclear family to expose the role of the twentieth-century American mother as a performative act. This subversion is exemplified through an array of central characters who undertake this performativity reluctantly and as the result of a societal coercion reinforced by a patriarchal hegemony that posits Rich’s maternal altruism as the universally-approved feature of womanhood., This essay seeks to demonstrate that what ensues as a result of the central characters’ failed attempt to perform motherhood intuitively is, in part, the rupture of the mother-child dynamic, enforced through the violent death of the child or childlike figure, a spectacle made public in line with Foucault’s theory on the nature of punishment.</p>