The Ocean's Dreams: Hannah Moscovitch's Maternal Histories

Hannah Moscovitch's recent Canadian history plays, What a Young Wife Ought to Know (premiered in Halifax, 2015) and Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story (premiered in Halifax, 2017), are both shaped by white working-class settler women's lived experiences of maternity as it intersects with poverty, disease, violence, and social inequality. In What a Young Wife Ought to Know, the Irish immigrant sisters Sophie and Alma are traumatized and destroyed by a society that disdains their sexuality and denies them the right to refuse pregnancy. In Old Stock, the traumatized Romanian-Jewish immigrant Chaya is given a stake in the future and brought back to active engagement with the world by the birth, illness, and survival of her son. Placing these characters' contrasting experiences in dialogue with one another, my paper will suggest that Moscovitch constructs post-confederation Canadian history as fundamentally a history of working-class mothers: women without whom the settler-colonial "nation of immigrants" could never have emerged, but who are often marginalized, erased, or actively oppressed by that nation's dominant power structures. Moscovitch steadfastly refuses to idealize motherhood as the foundation of the nation. Instead, her dramas hinge upon the (re)-emergence of the diverse voices and dreams of Canada's settler mothers. In the process, they embody the ways in which white feminine desire has both furthered and been frustrated by the settler-colonial state.