Abstract: This dissertation analyzes how novels by four contemporary writers---Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Erdrich, Ruth Ozeki, and Ana Castillo---represent motherhood. In my analyses, I work from the recognition that the lives of mothers are always constrained by their material circumstances, which are created, in large part, by dominant ideologies of gender and motherhood and experienced within the context of U.S. histories of racism and gender oppression. I also work from the assumption that the novels themselves theorize motherhood, and I find that the maternal self most discernible in these narrative theories is an inherently dissonant and vulnerable self. I read this dissonance as painfully necessary---the result of mothers' ambivalent experiences of protecting and nurturing life while at the same time confronting the uglier aspects of our social reality. I find that the experiences of maternal suffering that populate these novels always are tied to particularly painful political and historical realities---social realities built from the systemic racism and gender oppression in our most powerful social institutions and structures. I also argue that these experiences of maternal dissonance are ultimately productive as grounds for political and personal transformation. In chapter one, I focus on Kingsolver's The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, looking at how the dominant ideology of motherhood is profoundly influenced by narratives of progress and individualism, narratives which in turn shape the political and material circumstances of individual mothers' experiences. From there, I move to a study of how Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and The Antelope Wife work together to articulate a theory of, in Erdrich's words, the 'savagely coherent' maternal self that is inextricably knit into the very fabric of U.S. society. After Erdrich, I look at Ozeki's My Year of Meats and All Over Creation, attempting to discern how representations of the pregnant body can begin to theorize Adrienne Rich's 'thinking through the body' and also open up spaces for social change. Finally, in reading Ana Castillo's So Far From God, I focus on how the experience of extreme maternal grief can be transformative when deployed as a tool for social and political change.