“Bad mothers”: representation of motherhood in Spanish colonial literature written by women in the twentieth century

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the Moroccan maternal figures that appear in Spanish colonial fiction and written by women in the twentieth century. Some of these figures, in fact, correspond to the usual and traditional representations of the maternal that prevail in the Occident. However, in the Morocco imagined by the authoresses, the subversion of this figure also appears as another way of capturing the Moroccan otherness in an irreconcilable alterity with the values of the metropolis. Thus appear the “bad mothers” of Morocco as a praiseworthy mechanism of the woman Spanish left behind in the Iberian Peninsula.