From nineteenth century novels to films in the 1990s, American culture abounds with the images of white, middle-class mothers. Kaplan looks at how they appear in the psychoanalytic, historical and cultural spheres.

E. Ann Kaplan is Professor of English and Comparative Studies and Director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, the State University of New York. She is the author of Women and Film and Rocking Around the Clock, and editor of Psychoanalysis and Cinema.

Part 1 History and Theory Discourses; Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 The Historical Sphere; Chapter 3 The Psychoanalytic Sphere and Motherhood Discourse; Part 2 Motherhood and Fictional Representation; Chapter 4 Women'S Writing, Melodrama and Film; Chapter 5 The Maternal Melodrama: The Sacrifice Paradigm; Chapter 6 The Maternal Melodrama: The "Phallic" Mother Paradigm; Chapter 7 The "Resisting" Text Within the Patriarchal "Feminine"; Chapter 8 The "Resisting" Maternal Woman'S Film 1930-60; Chapter 9 Sex, Work and Mother/Fatherhood;