Abstract

In this paper, the author applies Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s theoretical framework of the culture industry to modern literary works to demonstrate the ways in which motherization, or the process by which women are trained and conditioned within a societal context to expect and desire motherhood, is deployed within the culture industry. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the Culture Industry destroys choice and alternative action to its audience. This process affects both the creator and the observer. It binds the choice of the artist and legitimizes the prescribed choice of the observer. Neither the creator of the piece nor the viewer is free. As Adorno explained “everything somehow appears ‘predestined’”. In other words, the Culture Industry exists outside of the people who produce and consume it. Horkheimer and Adorno were mostly concerned with general characteristics and consequences of the Culture Industry. In this paper, the author advances a more specific version of the Culture Industry. She argues that contemporary portrayals of motherhood in the Culture Industry are an integral part of both the motherization process. This is especially insidious in works targeting young women. Using Twilight, Hunger Games, and Herland, she demonstrates that portrayal of motherhood to young adolescent girls that becoming a mother is not a choice but a necessity. Furthermore, motherhood is not portrayed merely as an inevitability of womanhood rather motherhood must be of a particular type that produces women as a particularized docile body.