Motherhood

Throughout her novel, Elsewhere, Schaitkin thematically explores motherhood through her character Vera. After Vera graduates, she fears that she will never have children and imagines herself “grow[ing] old in [the] small, darkroom, an old woman who [is] still a child because her life had taught her none of what a mother knows” (68). The author utilizes this moment to illustrate how the cultural equation of womanhood and motherhood erases women’s identities and uses motherhood as a tool for suppression and submission. Vera understands herself through the male gaze, because of the town’s culture, and believes in the ideology that women cannot claim adulthood without bearing children. By viewing women as wombs, the town within the novel, and societies beyond the narrative parameters, contort motherhood into a tool for female suppression.

When Vera returns to the town, she notices that the community dotes on the...