Split selves and sticking feelings: Maternal subjectivity and affective ethics in Helen Phillips's The Need

Abstract

This article examines the fractured maternal subjectivity in Helen Phillips's The Need through the combined perspectives of Lisa Baraitser's Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption and Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion. The article analyses how Phillips's speculative story reflects the psychological dynamics of motherhood through its fragmented maternal identity, which breaks apart under ethical pressures and intense emotional forces. The theory of interruption by Baraitser shows that the protagonist's uncanny duplicate serves as a symbol for the ethical and temporal, and bodily disruptions that occur during caregiving. Ahmed's concept of affective economies allows us to analyse how fear and exhaustion and shame become attached to the maternal body, which determines both its social visibility and internal unity. The Need presents a maternal ethics, which manifests through disjuncture, because motherhood exists as an ethical bond with self-alterity. The research combines Baraitser's phenomenological framework of maternal time with Ahmed's analysis of emotional systems to show that maternal identity exists as an active process of balancing interruptions with affect and survival needs. Ultimately, the novel compels readers to confront the unresolvable tensions between care and crisis, repetition and rupture and love and fear that define contemporary maternal experience.