The maternal images of pregnancy and lactation as well as love are a crucial antidote to a 'Trump-ian' like revulsion at female bodily functions.
At the end of the play, he rocks the man like a baby; it's a maternal image, an echo of that first gaze of love, when the spectacle of self begins, which is, in Tennessee Williams's words, as "undeliberate as the act of breathing".
I think that for many of us, we feel that we are failing to embody the maternal image we envisioned when we were children, and that stirs up feelings of deep shame, loneliness and pain inside us.
Maternal images endure as far as the epilogue, featuring the arrival of Jeff, Corin and Roy at the Xeno base.
A maternal figure of wisdom?
Certainly, when maternal images appear in his poetry they are always terrible.
The Pieta in Renaissance art is an image of maternal love.
When the speeches were over, Hayden hugged his son and his new in-laws and rejoined the party, while Fonda, the image of maternal responsibility, went to each of the hundred or so seated guests, shaking their hands and thanking them individually for coming.
It's an unsettling image of maternal rage — Ruth enters the movie in a housecoat, perhaps in a sly nod to "Precious" — one that Ms. DuVernay, as she does throughout, plays with before peeling away the clichés and revealing the person underneath.
An image of athletic excellence and maternal warmth rolled into one.
