Rose begins her book with Oedipus and Jocasta, citing it as one example in a long tradition of maternal authority as fraught: “unevenly and inconsistently represented” (2). What happens, she asks, if we examine the story not from his point of view, but from hers, from the position of the mother in the plot? This question, across texts spanning from medieval to modern literature, drives the book as Rose endeavors to reveal meanings that have previously been ignored, obscured, or overlooked, particularly where plot and collective structures are concerned and where maternal authority has the potential to be transformative. While acknowledging important exceptions, Rose strives to examine the power typically assigned to the maternal body in normative Western literary representation. At the same time she calls attention to “the inability to connect that authority with public power or to create for it enlivened and sustained cultural forms” (4). Her larger project, focusing on dead and living mother plots, is understanding the plotting of maternal authority “as a political and social aesthetic structure: collectively created and recreated” (5).

Chapter 2 (following the introductory first chapter) investigates Saint Augustine’s Confessions and how the hero’s relationship with his mother, Monica, informs his education, his choices, and the narrative. Her death, which coincides with his baptism, both facilitates and obstructs his journey. Augustine’s accomplished exploitation of the dead mother plot, Rose argues, “works as the major structuring device that insures his rhetorical success” (17). Chapter 3 charts tales of Griselda from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, including versions by Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, to consider her motherhood, a little examined aspect of the familiar story. She reads Griselda’s submission to her husband’s authority, and the sacrifice of her children, as an attack on maternal authority. Chapter 4 turns to early modern literature, identifying the period as a structural center for the dead and living mother plots that both proceed and follow it, as well as the period in which modern notions of motherhood, marriage, and family become increasingly prominent. Ideological debate about family structures and relationships evident in legal and religious texts powerfully plays out in literature as motherhood is subjected to new scrutiny. She interrogates Shakespeare’s elimination of mothers from his romantic comedies as well as the ways his tragedies both make motherhood visible and problematize it. Her turn to “mother-authors” (87), the writers of mother’s legacies as well as Elizabeth Cary, sheds light on texts that, rather than eliminating maternal authority, “consistently insist on its immensity, while at the same time render its nature and goals incoherent” (89). Chapter 5 examines Milton’s Paradise Regained and its focus on the Virgin Mary and the ways in which her maternal authority is needed to affirm the heroic status of her son. Chapter 6 turns to Oscar Wilde’s representation of maternal authority and the marriage plot in his social comedies, arguing that Wilde understands the powerful potential he has to transform family relationships while not fully succeeding in this experiment. Chapter 7 identifies Tony Kushner’s radical revision of the dead and living mother plots in Angels in America and argues that he understands and fully embraces the political and cultural implications.

This book’s considerable strengths include crisp and convincing close readings of well-known literary works; among its achievements, it effectively examines the problematic cultural issue of maternal authority across time periods to reveal how this issue functions in plot both as an expectation and a complication. Rose’s incisive analysis of a wide range of texts and authors is sharp and elucidating. While the range is impressive, one wonders what the inclusion of and focus on additional texts written by women, or attention to texts by authors of color (especially in modern literature), might have revealed about the patterns and meanings she uncovers. That said, Rose makes a persuasive case for the plotting of maternal authority as an important structural and narrative device and, as a result, makes an important contribution to the understanding of maternity and gender as represented in Western literature across the centuries.