The Impact of the Moroccan Urban Context on Sociocultural Representations of Motherhood

Abstract

Thinking about motherhood is a crucial step in the female journey. This universal process, so glorified by society, reduces the female figure to a corporality that is obliged to meet societal standards. The latter have made it possible to categorize the mother despite her potential to put herself totally at the service of her offspring and/or to sacrifice herself for the well-being of the product of her womb. In this sense, Moroccan discourses, literary and social, depict motherhood as a conservative force whose representations are diversified and linked to the social and urban context. Urbanization will thus be designated as a variable impacting on the sociocultural representations of motherhood in Morocco. Thanks to studies on motherhood as well as theories of enunciation and narratology. We explore the privileged voices of narrators through maternal characters in order to show to what extent it is possible to dissociate the social context from the urban context in order to see if these two contexts have a different impact on the sociocultural representations of motherhood in Morocco.