“It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother?”: Motherhood, Race and Class in Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere and its TV Adaptation

Abstract

As most mothers would agree, motherhood is unique, life-altering experience, which does not come with an instruction manual. Neither time, nor experience or pre-existing social conventions can determine what makes someone a person fit for the role of a mother. The aim of this dissertation is, precisely, to debunk the aforementioned factors that have been established to determine a woman’s fitness as a mother as depicted in Celeste Ng’s novel Little Fires Everywhere published in 2017 and its TV adaptation, the limited series of the same name developed by Liz Tigelaar, which premiered in the streaming service Hulu in 2018. This dissertation will study the different ways in which women experience motherhood in the novel and the TV series; some characters have become mothers in the traditional manner (such as the character of Helena Richardson) and others have resorted to more unconventional methods such as adoption (as illustrated in the McCullogh family) and surrogacy (depicted in Mia Warren). In addition, this analysis will bring into question what role do class circumstances as well as race considerations have in the development of the experience of motherhood in Ng’s novel and Tigerlaar’s TV series