Good Enough, Bad Enough, Animal, Monster: Mothers in Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay considers the dark ambivalence of the monstrous mother in Alice Munro’s work, in particular in her 1998 collection, The Love of a Good Woman . In these eight stories — set from the 1940s through the 1970s — we encounter sickly mothers, stepmothers, mothers who abandon their children by leaving their husbands, and aunts who try to wrest a mother’s duties from her. Whereas we see such monsters everywhere in Munro’s many books, in this collection especially Munro suggests that mothers — in their particular intimate experience of the monstrosity of birth and how it introduces death into the world — cannot help embodying monstrosity, nor should they be condemned for trying to escape it. Employing theories of the good-enough mother by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, and Munro’s depiction of various functions of motherhood, including breastfeeding, this essay considers various monstrous maternal figures in The Love of a Good Woman and Munro’s emphasis therein on the inevitable space between being human and being animal that being a mother forces a woman to inhabit, along with the sometimes monstrous consequences of that role.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".