A PhD thesis with reflections from Anna Johnson
Link to thesis, Motherhood: on haunting and failure
Abstract
This exploratory, interdisciplinary study asks, how might ideas of haunting – those theorised by, for instance, Avery Gordon and Stephen Frosh, those in literature and those more colloquially expressed – support or enable expressions of motherhood experience and thus inform motherhood literature, and in turn our understanding of motherhood? There is also a strong focus on ideas of failure, as conceptualised by Jack Halberstam. In each chapter I overlay the ‘failures’ of the figure of the ghost with those of the mother, to examine what these apparent failures might tell us.
This project is formed of two parts. A critical dissertation (Part 1) that explores my own and other literary works in the contexts of relevant bodies of theory, including feminist theory, spectral theory, maternal theory, affect theory, and theories of difference including queer theory. This interdisciplinary collection of approaches is necessary to fully explore the complex intersectionality of motherhood experience. Part 2 takes the form of a life writing work of prose poetry based on my own motherhood experiences, and the ‘ghosts’ and ‘hauntings’ that seemed to attend that experience. The two parts continually informed one another, back and forth, as both pieces of writing developed. The creative writing prompted the theoretical exploration, and my reading and analysis then influenced my creative writing and editing decisions.
In either of these parts, my aim is not to make generalisations about ‘motherhood experience’, but rather to look at ways of making the breadth and specificity of these experiences more visible, of finding ways to express these often complex and layered experiences. The complex temporal, corporeal, psychological and cultural contexts in which motherhood exists and develops inscribes a variety of difficulties on this articulation. The restrictive, discriminatory constructs that place often essentialising or binary limits on what ‘counts’ as motherhood experience, or who ‘counts’ as a mother, further complicate matters. My project looks, in both practice and theory, at how we might use ideas of haunting to find a form of writing both complex enough and familiar enough to communicate motherhood experience. After all, ghosts are one of our oldest ways of trying to create a narrative framework for the unspeakable.
Whilst I draw on many literary texts, each chapter of Part 1 focusses on one or two texts in particular to draw out the issues of that chapter. These works span the 1960s to the present day, with a focus particularly on contemporary motherhood life writing. Each of these works, in very different ways, uses haunting to explore motherhood experiences. In each case, haunting provides a way to approach collapsed temporality and disjointed perceptions, allowing the complexity of these motherhood stories to be rendered closer to communicable.
Reflection
It’s hard now to imagine the very beginning of this project, my PhD, almost ten years ago. In a sense there might be several beginnings – my son’s birth, or the first time I hallucinated my hands (holding him) as someone else’s, or the first time I began writing notes on my phone to try to make sense of my motherhood experience, or perhaps meeting another new mother (with a Roland Barthes book in the bottom of her pushchair) who was half way through a PhD…I could go on, I could go much further back. At whatever point I mark the beginning, it is perhaps all these things that led me to write a PhD about motherhood and haunting.
I began writing (poetic-prose life writing) to survive the strangeness of motherhood, and my writing kept returning to ideas of ghosts and haunting. In the hallucinations and resurfacing of intergenerational trauma yes, but also in the mundane repetitions of caring labour. As I read accounts of motherhood (real accounts that strove to touch the truth of motherhood’s complexity and to break through the heavily policed and unrealistic versions of motherhood more commonly portrayed), I noticed that other writers turned to ghosts and haunting too to approach motherhood. From Denise Riley on the sudden death of her adult son, to Catherine Cho on postpartum psychosis, to Olga Ravn on the anxiety of motherhood, ghosts seemed to be everywhere.
So I wrote, and read, and mothered, gradually developing a thesis that mapped the ‘failures’ of the ghost over those of the mother – these ‘failures’ always of course only failures by the terms of normative structures. I narrowed these down to the failure to abide by the (normative) rules of:
- Time
- Feeling
- Boundaries
- Communication
In bringing ghosts and haunting alongside maternal theory (via queer, disability and feminist theory too) I found ways to imagine motherhood differently, to imagine how it might feel if we were to name, and perhaps even dismantle, the oppressive, normative structures that make ‘failure’ inevitable as a mother.
Alongside this research, I continued to write an account of my own motherhood experience. This developed into the prose-poetry book Motherhood: A Ghost Story, which is coming out with Broken Sleep Books later in 2025. I hope that this book will add to the growing body of work that strives to approach the complex, ambivalent realities of motherhood, and I am thankful to the language of ghosts that helped me to write it.
Cho, C. (2020) Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness. London: Bloomsbury.
Ravn, O. (2023) My Work, London: Lolli Editions.
Riley, D. (2019) Time Lived, Without its Flow. London: Picador.
Anna (she/they) is a writer, poet, lecturer and mother, with a background in visual art. Anna’s prose/poetry life writing practice centres around the complexity and ambivalence of motherhood experience, haunting, and failure. They draw on, amongst other things, disability theory, queer and feminist theory. Anna explores the ways in which we attempt to express difficult-to-articulate experiences, such as the strangeness of early motherhood. They have published broadly within maternal studies and as a poet. Their full-length prose-poetry work, Motherhood: a ghost story, is out with Broken Sleep Books in September 2025.
Anna lectures in creative writing and English literature at Kingston University, where they have also recently completed their PhD in creative writing. In addition, they run writing workshops, are a guest editor of Studies in the Maternal journal and co-founder of the Visceral Bodies research network.
Instagram: @annaotheranna
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