The ailing maternal body as a site of incommunicability, unknowability and violence in Willa C. Richards’s ‘Failure to Thrive’

Abstract

American author Willa C. Richards’s short story ‘Failure to Thrive’ (2019) thematizes physical, mental and emotional health by centring a young and presumably White American couple and their newborn. The couple have trouble communicating with each other, and crucial pieces of information are withheld from the reader as well. At the same time, numerous references to different types of violence emerge as markers of the maternal throughout the story to such an extent that the maternal body becomes the site not only of difference and unknowability but of violence as well. I anchor my analysis in motherhood studies and argue that motherhood is the discursive lens through which interlocking issues of embodiment, dehumanizing medical practices and diverse types of violence are exposed in ‘Failure to Thrive’. While attending to the narrative design of the story, I demonstrate how the ailing mother becomes a figure on whom the tropes of violence and incommunicability as well as the wide-reaching implications of ill health are mapped out.