The Other Mothers. The maternal community in Dy Plambeck’s Til min søster

One important example of the current wave of motherhood literature in Danish is Dy Plambeck’s novel Til min søster (2019; To my sister), a book that displays obvious intertextual traces of Dea Trier Mørch’s novel Vinterbørn (1976; Winter’s Child). Relying on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, I compare Plambeck’s novel to that of her predecessor, showing that she represents the postpartum woman as essentially estranged from other women in the same situation. Women from all walks of life bond socially in a hospital in Mørch’s novel, whereas Plambeck’s protagonist stays in a maternity hotel, the very name of which connotes privacy and isolation. While the theme of female bonding is crucial to Plambeck’s work, women do not form close relationships in the maternity hotel; it instead puts the family center stage.