“Mother” is a brilliantly short piece by American writer and activist Grace Paley. The story is written as a first-person narrative about the narrator who is inspired to remember their mother after hearing the line “oh, I long to see my mother in the doorway” from the Indiana state song “On the Banks of the Wabash” on the radio. The question of the narrator’s gender is open to interpretation as the piece is written in the first person and contains no pronouns. Hence begins my real motivation for writing this piece. I read “Mother” for my short American fiction class and, possessing no knowledge of the writer until after the fact, assumed the narrator was a man not because of any innate default to assume unspecified narrators are all men but because of two phrases used in the text. The first is the narrator’s exclamation of “By God!” at the start of the story followed by how the narrator’s mother refers to the narrator as a “damn fool.” Both phrases seemed to imply a masculine identity based on how we as a society are used to certain words being used and to certain exchanges taking place. It is interesting to consider that assuming an ambiguous first-person narrator is male is a default reaction, but equally interesting to consider when there are specific clues in a text that may shape the reader's impressions one way or another. Perhaps the two instances of language I earlier pointed out carry gendered connotations. Perhaps not. I am fascinated by the ambiguity of gender in "Mother" and how Grace Paley's identity as the author and her apparent purpose in writing semi-fictional semi-biographical pieces shape the meaning of the text. How are we as readers allowed to interpret fiction if the meaning is so reliant on the author’s identity? Are we permitted to read the story and insert our own idea of who “I” is, to enable the story to change based on who is reading and what sense of gender each reader feels? I think the answer is yes. You're currently a free subscriber to Letters By Layla. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Friday, 29 August 2025
On gender in Grace Paley's "Mother"
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