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

Introduction

In Helen Phillips’s (2019) The Need, the protagonist Molly encounters her doppelgänger in a dreamlike state, a figure that mirrors her fractured maternal self. The novel offers a disturbing picture of postpartum life, showing how the demands of caregiving intensify psychological strain and push maternal emotions towards breakdown. Rather than treating motherhood as a seamless transformation, Phillips presents it as a process that unsettles selfhood through constant emotional pressure and ethical obligation.

This article combines Lisa Baraitser's (2009) Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption with Sara Ahmed's (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion to examine how maternal subjectivity in The Need develops through disrupted temporal patterns and affective surges. Baraitser's framework shows that mothering is not a stable identity but an ethical relation forged through interruptions and delays, while Ahmed highlights how emotions such as fear, shame and ambivalence circulate socially, attaching to the maternal body. Together, these approaches allow the novel to be read as a representation of mothering lived in fractured time and saturated by circulating affects. Molly's uncanny meeting with her double captures these tensions, embodying both the interruptions of maternal temporality and the stickiness of maternal emotion.

Since Andrea O’Reilly and Amber E Kinser first recognised the epistemic power of maternal narratives, literature has provided a space to contest biological or romanticised views of motherhood. O’Reilly stresses that maternal thinking functions as a resistance to cultural erasures of maternal subjectivity, while Victoria Browne shows that contemporary motherhood is fragmented in time and ethically unsettled, standing in tension with neoliberal ideals of efficiency. Molly's story illustrates these insights vividly: the routines of childcare and the weight of affect make it nearly impossible for her to sustain a coherent maternal identity under such pressures.

This article contributes to affect and maternal studies by showing that The Need does more than echo theoretical frameworks: it stages their tensions through narrative form. Reading Phillips's novel with Baraitser's notion of interruption and Ahmed's account of circulating emotions demonstrates how fiction complicates theoretical categories rather than simply reflecting them. Maternal subjectivity in the novel is neither whole nor entirely collapsed; it appears instead as a condition continually worked out through rupture, obligation and emotional excess. We argue that The Need treats motherhood as survival work rather than a fixed identity. Read with Baraitser's account of interruption and Ahmed's account of circulating feelings, the novel shows how care goes on under strain and how this pressure shapes the mother's sense of self. The article's contribution to maternal studies is a simple model of affective survival that links everyday scenes of care to an ethics of endurance.

Theoretical framework

To examine how maternal subjectivity is represented in The Need, this article employs a dual framework that brings together Lisa Baraitser's account of temporal interruption and Sara Ahmed's analysis of affective economies. These two theorists have been chosen not simply for convenience but because their ideas speak directly to the kinds of maternal ruptures and emotional intensities that Phillips's novel stages. Where earlier approaches, such as Kristeva's psychoanalytic account or Butler's focus on performativity, emphasise symbolic structures of language and identity, Baraitser and Ahmed pay closer attention to the everyday experience of mothering as lived time and circulating feeling. Their frameworks make it possible to analyse how the maternal body is shaped both by ethical interruptions in care and by the stickiness of emotions that attach to and weigh upon that body.

Baraitser's work situates motherhood in the realm of temporal disruption. She argues that maternal subjectivity is not continuous or developmental but formed through delays, pauses and interruptions in daily life. These moments of stammering time are not failures but openings for ethical relation, in which the self is reconfigured through responsibility for the other. Ahmed's account of affective economies complements this view by tracing how emotions move between subjects, sticking to bodies and giving them social meaning. Fear, shame and tenderness are not simply private states but circulate in ways that shape who is recognised as a ‘good’ mother and who is marked as deficient.

At the same time, the two perspectives do not entirely align. For Baraitser, interruption has a generative ethical force, allowing the subject to become through rupture. Ahmed, by contrast, stresses how emotions can fix subjects in place: shame and fear may cling to the maternal body in ways that restrict agency. The tension between these approaches is useful for reading The Need, where Molly's encounter with her doppelgänger captures both aspects. On one hand, the uncanny doubling stages the fractured temporality of caregiving; on the other, it makes visible the heavy burden of emotions that circulate socially and settle on the maternal figure. By combining these frameworks, the article shows how the novel dramatises motherhood as at once interrupted and overloaded, fractured and saturated, caught between the possibility of ethical relation and the constraint of sticky affect.

Before turning to the detailed accounts of Baraitser and Ahmed, it is important to distinguish three terms that often overlap in discussions of motherhood: rupture, trauma and failure. In this article, rupture is used as the primary frame. Following Baraitser, rupture refers to the interruptions of time and selfhood that mark the everyday practice of mothering – the pauses, the stammers, the breaks that make continuity impossible yet open the mother to ethical relation.

Trauma, by contrast, names the psychic destabilisation that may follow when those interruptions become overwhelming. In The Need, Molly's visions of an intruder or her encounter with the doppelgänger illustrate how ordinary maternal disruption can tip into experiences of disorientation that carry a traumatic weight.

Finally, failure refers less to the mother's internal state than to the cultural lens through which she is judged. Within neoliberal discourses of parenting, interruptions and breakdowns are often read as personal inadequacy. Ahmed's analysis of sticky emotions helps clarify this: shame and fear cling to the maternal body, producing the sense of having failed even when the disruption is structurally inevitable.

This article emphasises rupture as its main conceptual frame, while recognising that trauma and failure remain entangled with it. Phillips's novel illustrates how maternal life is lived not in neat categories but across these overlapping registers: rupture as daily interruption, trauma as psychic consequence and failure as cultural judgement.

This reading of The Need expands the field of maternal and affect studies by demonstrating how abstract theoretical ideas take shape within a narrative of everyday maternal life. Baraitser's account of interruption and Ahmed's analysis of circulating emotions are often discussed in philosophical or sociological terms; Phillips's novel shows how these frameworks resonate in a cultural text that represents the disorientation and affective weight of mothering. The novel, therefore, contributes not only to literary analysis but also to feminist debates on maternal subjectivity by illustrating how rupture and affect intertwine in lived experience. In this way, the article highlights the value of cultural analysis for extending theoretical discussions, grounding them in the contradictions of maternal care as represented in fiction.

Interrupted time, fractured selves

Molly is a palaeobotanist working at the Phillips 66 fossil quarry, parenting two small children (Viv and Ben) with her partner, David, who is often away. The novel keeps us close to the house – bedroom, living room, kitchen – and to the pits where time seems to snag. From the opening pages, Molly is already split between care and fear: ‘She crouched in front of the mirror in the dark, clinging to them. The baby in her right arm, the child in her left’ (Phillips, 2019: 1). This is the ground on which the later doubling appears: an ordinary night stretched by exhaustion and panic.

Through The Need, Helen Phillips develops a maternal story that rejects traditional linear representations of caregiving and unified identity. The novel presents a subjectivity which exists in a state of ethical disconnection while being overwhelmed by emotions. The surreal encounter between the protagonist and her doppelgänger becomes understandable through Lisa Baraitser's theory of temporal interruption and Sara Ahmed's affective economies as a narrativised disruption of maternal temporality and emotion. The doppelgänger functions as a crisis figure who represents the accumulation of repetitive caregiving responsibilities, together with suppressed anger and the unattainable state of complete self-integration.

According to Baraitser (2009: 14), the concept of ‘maternal time’ shows that maternal subjectivity emerges through non-linear recursive time, which resists narrative unity. In Phillips's narrative, the protagonist experiences repeated disruptions in perception and memory. Her routines – pumping breast milk, comforting a child, folding laundry – do not mark progress but cyclical overwhelm. This repetition performs what Adriana Cavarero identifies as an ‘exposure to the other’ that breaks the self's continuity (Cavarero, 2000: 9). Such interruptions reflect what Natalie Wigg-Stevenson calls ‘maternal asynchrony’, wherein ‘the rhythms of mothering unravel conventional logics of time and self’ (Wigg-Stevenson, 2021: 223).

As the protagonist confronts her own double, her sense of time collapses. What Mary O’Brien terms ‘the dialectics of birth and interruption’ reemerges in uncanny form: the double is a simultaneous threat and extension of the maternal body (O’Brien, 1981: 108). This confrontation parallels Angela Mitropoulos's argument that ‘the maternal disrupts not only biological continuity but also the temporal frameworks of the political subject’ (Mitropoulos, 2012: 115). The maternal self is therefore rendered incoherent, not due to individual instability but because of the sociopolitical contradictions embedded in caregiving.

Lisa Guenther observes that care creates ‘a suspended field of relationality that delays the linear unfolding of the subject's narrative’ (Guenther, 2006: 58). In The Need, this suspension is dramatised through nested flashbacks, repetitions and looping scenes in which past, present and imagined futures bleed into one another. The protagonist lives in ‘maternal simultaneity’, a state that Julia Kristeva refers to as ‘a time of abjection, where the subject is always on the edge of collapse and renewal’ (Kristeva, 1982: 79). The double is not only her shadow but also her temporal twin, materialising the ethical and affective residue left by caregiving's constant demands.

This residue is best understood through Ahmed's theory of ‘sticky feelings’. Ahmed (2014: 27) asserts that ‘emotions accumulate over time, becoming affective residues that define both bodies and spaces’. In Phillips's novel, the domestic space is saturated with maternal fear: fear of failure, of collapse, of being both too much and not enough. The protagonist's body becomes a site where exhaustion, terror and tenderness co-exist. As Ahmed explains, ‘emotions do not reside in subjects or objects but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow subjects and objects to emerge’ (Ahmed, 2014: 10).

Fear in this context is not merely psychological but cultural. According to Meredith Nash, ‘maternal fear is frequently a product of the intensification of risk discourses in neoliberal parenting cultures’ (Nash, 2012: 164). The mother's breakdown is shaped by the cultural expectation of affective self-regulation, even under duress. Lauren Berlant's idea of ‘cruel optimism’ is particularly apt here: the protagonist clings to the dream of maternal coherence while that very attachment threatens her psychic survival (Berlant, 2011: 1). As Arlie Hochschild notes, ‘emotional labour is the work that women do to smooth over the contradictions of care’ (Hochschild, 2012: 7), and in The Need that labour becomes unsustainable.

This dynamic is visually and psychologically manifested in the presence of the double. Karen Leeder refers to such figures as ‘the monstrous maternal twin—repository for everything the maternal must suppress: rage, sexuality, exhaustion’ (Leeder, 2020: 23). The protagonist's double holds her child with care but also enacts her repressed violence, creating what Julie Stephens calls ‘affective dissonance—the simultaneous inhabiting of maternal ideal and rupture’ (Stephens, 2011: 89). The mother must negotiate her own legitimacy while being confronted with the possibility that her double may be a more emotionally available caregiver.

Nancy Chodorow identifies this dynamic as the ‘reproduction of mothering through ambivalent identification’, wherein maternal identity is formed not by clarity but by recursive emotional conflict (Chodorow, 1978: 49). The protagonist's interactions with her double become sites of emotional excess, what Imogen Tyler refers to as ‘affective spillover—when the containment of emotion is no longer possible under structural duress’ (Tyler, 2013: 142). This is reinforced by Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff's assertion that the postfeminist mother is ‘expected to be affectively entrepreneurial, constantly self-regulating, smiling through crisis’ (Gill and Scharff, 2011: 9).

The Need disrupts this expectation by allowing maternal emotions to overrun their boundaries. In doing so, it exemplifies what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 210) terms ‘matters of care’ – not as stable ethical positions but as moments of conflict, entanglement and affective charge. The novel does not resolve the protagonist's fragmentation but renders it visible, ethical and necessary. As Julie Kelso argues, ‘maternal texts that refuse wholeness challenge the very foundations of how we conceptualise subjectivity’ (Kelso, 2007: 98). The fractured self in The Need thus becomes a feminist site of resistance, where the ethical and emotional burdens of care are made narratively and symbolically inescapable.

Affective economies of motherhood

The construction of maternal identity in The Need is shown through Molly's everyday crises. When she hides with her children, time stretches unbearably, each second marked by the demand to keep them safe (Phillips, 2019: 5). Later, her body itself becomes a site of saturation: ‘milk dripped from her even when the child had finished, unstoppable’ (Phillips, 2019: 42). These moments capture how maternal subjectivity is pulled apart by temporal interruption and weighed down by emotions that persist in and on the body. Phillips situates Molly within the suburban home and the fossil pit, two spaces that mirror the novel's tension. The house, with its bedrooms, kitchen and dimly lit mirrors, becomes the site of maternal vigilance and fear, where every sound may signal threat. The fossil pit, by contrast, introduces temporal disturbance through uncanny objects such as the Bible with misprinted words and the Coke bottle that should not exist in that layer of soil (Phillips, 2019: 23). Together, these spaces root the narrative in both domestic and scientific settings, while also amplifying the sense of rupture that defines Molly's experience of mothering. The emotional dynamics in the novel become interpretable through Sara Ahmed's concept of affective economies. The novel shows that caregiving exists beyond instincts because it functions as a cultural space where emotional control meets symbolic oppression and neoliberal work requirements. The mother's exhaustion and fear, together with her ecstatic moments, emerge as visible effects of emotional work which the system requires from mothers while it simultaneously elevates and separates them from their roles.

Molly often hides her fear so that her children won’t panic. She steadies her voice and keeps her face calm. This is the emotional labour that Hochschild describes – managing feeling so that care appears reliable (Hochschild, 2012: 7). Ahmed's idea of stickiness explains why this work wears her down: fear and shame do not pass through; they stay with her, on the body and in the house. In The Need, that pressure is constant, and composure itself becomes a form of endurance.

The protagonist's emotional breakdown sits within an ideal of motherhood that normalises self-sacrifice and emotional depletion. O’Reilly (2016) describes how such ideals erase maternal subjectivity even as they demand more care. In The Need, that erasure becomes visible: composure is required precisely when it is least possible, and breakdown becomes the cost of keeping the image of the ‘good’ mother intact. This labour is invisibilised, even as it becomes the basis for maternal legitimacy. Yet Phillips's mother oscillates between deep tenderness and eruptive fear, breaking this alignment and refusing containment.

Lauren Berlant calls this attachment cruel optimism: the wish to sustain what quietly wears one out. In The Need, the fantasy of the composed, ever-present mother binds Molly to exhaustion. The novel shows how hope itself becomes heavy work – each effort to remain calm adds another layer of strain.

The novel treats maternal anger as structural, not aberrant. O’Reilly (2016) has shown that anger can be a lucid response to the cultural devaluation of care. In Phillips's narrative, the double carries that pressure into view – holding the child with care while also registering the destructive edge that overwork and vigilance produce. Phillips visualises this anger through the doppelgänger, which represents both caregiving and the destructive effects of excessive work.

The Need demonstrates how maternal affect experiences transformation through the intersection of class, racial and gender structures. According to Yvette Taylor, emotions do not distribute uniformly across maternal subjects because they become visible and understandable based on racial, class and gender factors (Taylor, 2007: 137). The affective logic of the novel supports broader critiques by showing that all mothers, regardless of their social status, must navigate the perfect motherhood affective economy.

Lisa Baraitser, building on Ahmed, emphasises that caregiving is ‘not a space of stable attachment, but a site of temporal and affective rupture where care occurs in interrupted time and emotional dissonance’ (Baraitser, 2009: 43). This dissonance is viscerally rendered when the protagonist feels both overwhelming love and profound alienation from her child. Other scholars support this notion of affective contradiction. For instance, Julia Chinyere Oparah and Loretta Ross, in their work on reproductive justice, argue that ‘the maternal subject must be understood through a matrix of historical trauma, emotional labour, and structural abandonment’ (Oparah and Ross, 2017: 6). This matrix is apparent in The Need, where the protagonist is left alone to manage both childcare and psychic disintegration. Tina Chanter's argues that ‘maternal horror in contemporary texts articulates the abject dimensions of motherhood—the irreducible ambiguity between love and loathing’ (Chanter, 2008: 58).

Indeed, the emotional saturation of the maternal subject in The Need reflects what Ann Cvetkovich calls ‘public feelings’ – those emotions that do not align with traditional public discourse but shape political subjectivity (Cvetkovich, 2012: 17). Exhaustion, depression and ambivalence are not private failures but public, shared and structural effects. Likewise, Victoria Hesford reminds us that maternal narratives often ‘emerge from what is unspoken or illegible in dominant scripts of emotion’, a space where ‘feeling exceeds articulation’ (Hesford, 2013: 201). This ineffability is present in Phillips's spare, elliptical prose, where emotions are shown rather than explained.

The burden of maternal emotionality also aligns with what Alison Stone calls ‘affective captivity’ – a state in which maternal identity is tethered to emotional performance and ethical availability, even at the cost of selfhood (Stone, 2012: 93). This captivity is symbolised in the novel by the domestic space itself – a site that should offer safety but instead intensifies exposure, performance and collapse. As Imogen Tyler notes, the maternal subject is ‘simultaneously invisible and hyper visible, watched but unsupported’ (Tyler, 2013: 143). This paradox becomes increasingly painful as the protagonist's private suffering intensifies under the weight of public expectations.

In this context, Phillips's text participates in what Julie Stephens describes as ‘post maternal narratives’ – texts that critique the cultural impossibility of mothering under current economic and emotional conditions (Stephens, 2011: 88). Rather than idealising maternal emotion, The Need historicises and politicises it. As Lisa Smyth contends, ‘maternal feeling is not only discursively constructed but deeply political, revealing the fault lines of care economies’ (Smyth, 2012: 122). Phillips contributes to this discourse by presenting maternal emotion as neither sacred nor stable but as a terrain of ethical crisis and social exposure.

In sum, The Need exposes the workings of affective economies on the maternal subject. The protagonist's fractured identity, embodied by her double, illustrates how love, fear, shame and rage circulate through caregiving roles. These emotions do not belong solely to the mother – they are historically shaped, culturally coded and politically weaponised. As Ahmed asserts, ‘emotions do things: they align individuals with communities—or keep them apart’ (Ahmed, 2014: 28). In Phillips's novel, emotional misalignment becomes a form of resistance, revealing the violence beneath the ideal and opening space for a new ethics of maternal feeling.

The emotional connections between shame, rage, exhaustion and devotion which pass through the maternal body function as ethical challenges rather than emotional disturbances. The increasing affective saturation creates more complex moral situations for mothers who face structural challenges. Phillips uses The Need to move past affective critique by exploring maternal ethics, which examines the meaning of caring and surviving while being responsible when personal boundaries dissolve. The caregivers are ethically challenged by the appearance of the doppelgänger, rather than providing for emotional resolution. The complete comprehension of maternal subjectivity in The Need requires us to shift from analysing emotional systems to studying the moral and existential challenges that it generates.

Maternal ethics, survival and doubling

In The Need, the arrival of the doppelgänger is not merely a surrealistic plot device but a rupture in the ethical landscape of maternal subjectivity. This moment crystallises the protagonist's internal fragmentation – her inability to sustain the cultural performance of the ‘good mother’ under neoliberal, affectively saturated demands. The doppelgänger's presence forces a confrontation with the maternal self that is hidden, disallowed or unspeakable: the self that is exhausted, resentful, violent and yet still caring. The ethical entanglement presented in this doubling reflects what Lisa Baraitser describes as ‘the ethics of interruption, where the self is constituted in relation to an other who demands care and disrupts linear identity’ (Baraitser, 2009: 32).

In this relational fracture, the protagonist must negotiate the ethics of survival, not merely in terms of physical protection but of psychic continuity. Baraitser asserts that ‘care undoes the fantasy of the autonomous self; it is an ethics grounded in discontinuity’ (Baraitser, 2009: 43). This undoing becomes literal in The Need, as the mother is forced to ‘care for’ the double, who in turn performs caregiving acts for the protagonist's child. The boundaries of ethical responsibility – between self and other, mother and impostor – are blurred. As Baraitser notes, caregiving ‘undoes’ the fantasy of autonomy; the ethical relation appears precisely when the self is interrupted by another's need. This ‘undoing’ is not just theoretical in Phillips's narrative; it is embodied in the mother's surrender to a version of herself she cannot recognise but also cannot abandon.

Sara Ahmed's affective theory enhances this reading by highlighting how emotions like fear, shame and guilt ‘align bodies with social norms or push them to the margins’ (Ahmed, 2014:14). The protagonist is forced by the doppelgänger into an affective space of abjection, where she is no longer legible as a proper maternal subject. Julia Kristeva theorises this process as ‘abjection’, a breakdown of the distinction between self and other that causes psychic instability but also opens transformative potential (Kristeva, 1982: 65). The mother in The Need becomes abject in her intimacy with the double, yet this abjection allows her to confront and ultimately integrate parts of herself that normative motherhood represses.

Survival here is an ethical bind. The mother must protect a child while staying open to a demand that undoes her. Tronto's point is clear: ‘good care cannot be disentangled from the vulnerability of those who provide it’ (Tronto, 1993: 102). The novel shows that vulnerability in action. This affective relay is not symmetrical. While The Need features a white, middle-class protagonist, her emotional breakdown still echoes the structural overload that Fusco links to maternal exhaustion as systemic. Similarly, Imogen Tyler argues that the mother's exposure in domestic space reflects a broader ‘crisis of care’, where maternal labour is devalued yet made essential (Tyler, 2013: 145). Thus, the protagonist's psychic fragmentation is both personal and collective, rendering her double a symbol of shared maternal rupture.

The ethical dilemma is where the protagonist must decide whether to trust or destroy her double. This ambivalence underscores an ethical point: responsiveness arises not from certainty but from staying with the tensions that care inevitably brings (Baraitser, 2009: 43). The mother's refusal to eliminate the double – even when she has the chance – signals not failure but ethical recognition: the acknowledgement that her double, though terrifying, is part of her survival.

This survival is narrated through trauma, but not in terms of a singular wound. Rather, as Cathy Caruth notes, trauma is ‘experienced too late, belatedly, and therefore repeated, re-entered, and relived’ (Caruth, 1996: 4). The protagonist's looping temporal structure – where routines are lived and relived with slight variations – mirrors this repetition. The trauma is not one event but the ongoing impossibility of stable care. Jessica Benjamin would call this ‘the double bind of mutual recognition’, where the caregiver desires both connection and distance, sameness and separation (Benjamin, 1988: 54).

In this view, the double is not merely threatening. She becomes the literalisation of what Tina Chanter terms ‘maternal horror’ – a space where love becomes indistinguishable from loathing and protection morphs into domination (Chanter, 2008: 61), and even this horror carries the seed of transformation. As Baraitser notes, ‘care is not a salve for fracture; it is where fracture lives’ (Baraitser, 2009: 67). In Phillips's text, this fracture is not healed but neither is it ignored. It is narrated, embodied and ethically engaged.

Therefore, The Need redefines maternal subjectivity through ethical ambiguity and emotional ambivalence. The doppelgänger encounter is not an aberration but the very structure of caregiving under strain: to care is to be doubled, divided and ethically unmoored. As Ahmed reminds us, ‘the political happens when affect moves bodies towards or away from others’ (Ahmed, 2014: 29). In The Need, the protagonist's fragmented self does not move away from the double but moves through her, towards an ethical reckoning with the unbearable demands and unspeakable emotions of mothering. This article names affective survival to describe how mothers persist when care feels impossible. Reading The Need with Baraitser's interrupted time and Ahmed's sticky emotions links survival to both feeling and obligation. Methodologically, the article models scene-first analysis: theory follows narrative moments where endurance is visible. Conceptually, it reframes maternal subjectivity not as wholeness or collapse but as ongoing persistence under pressure.

Conclusion

Molly's story in The Need turns the ordinary work of care into a test of endurance. The novel stays close to small, repeated moments – soothing a crying child, cleaning a spill, trying to rest while listening for sounds that might mean danger. Each moment stretches time and drains her, yet she continues. This is what Baraitser calls the time of care, where love is not an emotion but a rhythm that interrupts itself. Ahmed helps explain why this rhythm feels heavy: feelings like fear and shame do not pass through Molly; they stick to her body and to the spaces she moves through.

Phillips's story slows us down long enough to notice how survival looks in everyday life. Nothing in Molly's routine is triumphant or resolved. Her survival is quiet, shaped by repetition and fatigue, by the need to stay present even when she would rather vanish for a while. In showing this, the novel widens the conversation in maternal studies. It reminds us that what keeps mothers alive is not perfection or insight but the simple fact of keeping on – holding a child, breathing through a long night, starting again the next day.

This reading reframes survival as both an affect and an ethic. To endure is not to remain untouched but to keep living inside uncertainty. Molly's care is the form that endurance takes; it turns what seems like breakdown into continuity. In that sense, The Need offers a feminist lesson in persistence: that staying, even shakily, can itself be a form of strength.