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

This essay examines Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (1961), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) through the application of Adrienne Rich’s concept of maternal altruism and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) and Technologies of the Self (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.