Discussion Topic
Significance of Deliberateness in Brooks' "The Mother"
Summary:
In Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "The Mother," the line "even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate" captures the complex emotional and moral ambiguity faced by the speaker, who has had multiple abortions. Despite making a conscious decision, the speaker feels conflicted and haunted by these choices, highlighting the challenging conditions and lack of clear answers in such situations. Brooks skillfully portrays the speaker's inner turmoil, emphasizing that pain and uncertainty are the only certainties in the decision of abortion.
What does the line "even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate" mean in Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "the mother"?
The speaker in Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “the mother” is a woman who seems to have had multiple abortions but who also seems to be haunted by the choices she made to abort her “children” (2). These choices have apparently been “deliberate,” at least in the sense that she seems to feel responsible for them, although the precise reasons that she chose to have not only one abortion but apparently several or even many remain unclear.
Much of the poem is ambiguous and ambivalent. The speaker chose to have abortions but seems not to feel comfortable, at least at present, with her past choices. She seems to value motherhood, and yet she confesses that she has chosen, on more than one occasion, to end the process of becoming a mother. She speculates about the various futures her potential children might have had, so that she imagines their now-impossible...
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futures even as she seems to regret her own actual past.
Line 21 comes at the very end of a long and rhetorically powerful sentence:
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. (14-21)
Here the speaker concludes by seeming to suggest that although she did indeed make the deliberate choice to have abortions, she did so with mixed and highly complicated feelings. She was “not deliberate,” then, because she seems to have felt ambivalent about her choices even as she made them. She had to make practical decisions in order to have the abortions, but having abortions (apparently) what was not part of some prior, long-range plan. It is not as if she deliberately became pregnant in order to deliberately have abortions. Rather , in an era before reliable birth control, the more likely possibility is that she became pregnant, decided that she was unable to have children or raise them properly (perhaps because of financial pressures), and then had to decide to abort her pregnancies.
In this sense, then, as well as in the other senses just suggested, she seems to have been, “even in [her] deliberateness . . . not deliberate.”
What is the significance of the line, "Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate," in Brooks' "The Mother"?
In her poem, "The Mother," Brooks is skilled at bringing out the complexity in the title character. Brooks is not too keen on making judgments or creating a setting where arbitrary and simple solutions are posited. Rather, she seeks to bring out the moral ambiguity and challenging conditions that "the mother" who lives in trying conditions face. The narrative style brings out this complexity:
The depiction of the narrator—honest, reflective, and self-aware—prevents an immediate positive or negative characterization. Instead, like the decisions she has made, the narrator is complicated—full of conflicting emotions regarding both herself and her lost children. Ironically, it was the mother’s moving concern for her children as well as her own circumstances which caused her to decide to have the abortions.
The entire poem is encapsulated with this thematic hope. The lines of reflection help to bring this out, as there is little clear in how Brooks feels about the narrator, and even how the narrator feels about her choices. Consider the line in question as representation of this: "Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate." This line brings out the fact that the mother truly believed that abortion was the right option for her and for the sake of her children. The word choice helps to bring this out. "Deliberateness" reflects that much intellectual and emotional agony was present in this decision. With the freedom and autonomy of the mother, this decision was made. This, however, becomes the root of the complexity. The decision was made with a sense of the "deliberate," yet since nothing is clear and concrete in an issue like abortion, the speaker contradicts her own findings. In undercutting the "deliberateness" with "I was not deliberate," the mother makes it clear that abortion and the conditions that prompt it are far from clear. The only certainty is hurt and pain within such a state of being. The mother has no answers, reason enough for the fact that she cannot claim to be "deliberate" even when she was "deliberate." In this light, the line brings out the fact that abortion is a topic that brings more questions than answers to it. While the topic is a passionate one, Brooks steers clear of these traps by rendering a portrait of haunting pain. This hurt is rooted in the fact that while the decision to have an abortion is one taken with great weight and thought, all of that is secondary to the pain present. This postmodern vision of freedom is one where one is condemned to wonder about individual choices made and a haunting certainty that pain is the only absolute in such a condition.