Maternal Eroticism and Female Desire in Sue Miller’s The Good Mother

In this chapter, Amanda Kane Rooks argues that Sue Miller's American novel The Good Mother provides an illustration of the way motherhood and female sexuality continued to serve as key sites of patriarchal control over women in the late twentieth century, despite the alleged freedoms won for women in the wake of the feminist and sexual liberation movements. More specifically, Rooks argues that Miller's novel provides a disruption of the borders between mothering and eroticism in a way that brings to light the cultural anxieties that continue to surround these aspects of female experience