Motherhood as a contested identity

Motherhood as a contested identity in Elena Knows is not a single instinctive condition but a role imposed, refused, endured, and questioned by three women. Rita insists that Isabel must become a mother; Isabel later describes the shame of not wanting motherhood after her daughter is born; and Elena, facing illness and the death of her only child, asks whether she was a good mother and whether she can still understand her daughter. Their stories expose the distance between maternal identity as a social ideal and the complicated bodily and emotional lives that ideal is meant to contain.

Social ideals and competing claims

The novel sets private experience against powerful claims about what motherhood should mean. Rita invokes religious teaching to oppose Isabel’s attempt to end her pregnancy, treating the pregnancy as a child and motherhood as an obligation. Isabel rejects that definition at the time: she does not want to become a mother and insists that the choice concerns her own body. Rita answers with certainty, although she has no experience of pregnancy or motherhood herself. In this encounter, conviction substitutes for knowledge, and a moral ideal becomes authority exercised over another woman.

The disagreement is not presented as a dispute between two equally free choices. Isabel is already in a vulnerable situation, and Rita’s intervention removes the decision from her. The novel’s wider account emphasizes that women’s reproductive lives are constrained by religious doctrine, family relations, and medical power. Its focus is therefore not only whether motherhood is valued, but who has the power to define it and whose body bears the consequences of that definition.

Rita’s intervention and its consequences

Twenty years before Elena’s visit to Isabel, Rita finds her vomiting while on her way to seek an abortion. Rita initially reacts with disgust, then stops and intervenes, explaining to Elena that she heard a voice telling her Isabel was pregnant and about to enter the place. Rita argues that Isabel will regret an abortion and uses religious and maternal language to persuade her to continue the pregnancy. When Isabel says she does not want a child, Rita insists that she is already a mother. She also appeals to the existence of a father, despite Isabel’s refusal to make his wishes decisive.

Rita takes Isabel to Elena’s home while Isabel is dizzy and exhausted. The narration makes the asymmetry plain: Rita is determined, while Isabel is in no condition to resist effectively. Rita’s action thus turns her belief about motherhood into a decision imposed on another person. The consequences extend far beyond that afternoon. Isabel has a daughter, but the fact of motherhood does not resolve her earlier refusal or make her feel naturally suited to the role. Instead, the experience becomes part of a history of other people treating her body and reproductive choices as theirs to direct.

Isabel’s experience of unwanted motherhood

When Isabel later speaks with Elena, she distinguishes knowing an argument about motherhood from living its consequences. She describes having empty breasts and feeling guilt and shame when her infant daughter seeks contact and she does not want to hold, soothe, or comfort her. These feelings conflict with the social expectation that a mother should want to mother. Isabel’s account gives substance to maternal ambivalence without reducing it to a failure of character: she has a child, yet the expected feelings do not follow automatically.

Her account also places that ambivalence within a longer history of coercion. Isabel explains that her husband, Marcos, used force within their marriage and that she became pregnant in circumstances where her wishes were not respected. During the pregnancy, she was closely supervised and sedated, while others treated her as incapable of deciding for herself. This history complicates any simple description of motherhood as a freely chosen identity. Isabel’s eventual motherhood followed a pregnancy she did not want, and her distress afterward was intensified by the insistence that she should feel and behave as a mother ought.

Isabel further accuses Rita of having treated her body as if it belonged to someone else. She sees Elena’s later visit as risking a repetition of that wrong: Elena has come seeking answers about Rita’s death, but Isabel believes Elena may also be trying to use her body and experience to serve her own needs. The exchange makes maternal duty inseparable from bodily autonomy and from the possibility that care can become control.

Illness, care, and Elena’s uncertainty

The novel places Isabel’s experience beside the changing mother-daughter relationship between Elena and Rita. As Elena’s Parkinson’s disease progresses, Dr Benegas tells Rita that Elena will increasingly need help with ordinary activities and that the illness will affect her speech, mobility, and independence. He describes caregiving as a reversal of roles, asking Rita to become her mother’s mother. Rita resists the comparison between Elena and a baby: the changes she anticipates are not the beginning of a life, but the loss of abilities her mother once had.

This reversal exposes the difference between a social label and the actual labor of care. Rita is expected to take responsibility for Elena, but she admits she may not be able to bear what lies ahead. Elena, meanwhile, wants to remain in her own home and says she wants to live. Their conflict does not settle into a simple account of a devoted mother and dutiful daughter. It shows how illness places pressure on affection, independence, and the assumption that family members can always provide the care required of them.

After Rita’s death, Elena’s questions about motherhood become questions about what she knew and what she failed to know. In Isabel’s home, she asks whether she was a good mother. Isabel does not give her a verdict. Their conversation instead allows Elena to say that she loved Rita and believes Rita loved her, while leaving the quality of their relationship open to its particular, imperfect history. Elena also wonders whether Rita feared inheriting her illness; Isabel offers a different possibility, that Rita could not bear to see Elena suffer. Neither explanation becomes definitive knowledge.

Shared uncertainty and the limits of the ideal

The encounter between Isabel and Elena shifts from accusation toward a fragile recognition of shared uncertainty. Isabel does not excuse Rita’s intervention, and Elena cannot answer the questions Isabel raises about why Rita acted as she did or why she went to the church on the rainy day she died. But the two women begin to listen to one another. Their bond is expressed through Isabel’s cat, which moves between them and eventually allows them to pet it together. The small exchange offers contact without resolving their histories or making either woman’s pain stand for the other’s.

Motherhood remains unsettled at the close. Elena chooses life despite illness and grief, but does not arrive at a confident account of herself as a mother. Isabel has raised a daughter while rejecting the idea that the role necessarily describes her inner life. Rita, who imposed motherhood on Isabel, is herself dead, and the surviving women cannot know all that she thought or felt. The novel’s critique rests in these distinctions: bearing or raising a child does not guarantee maternal desire, religious certainty does not confer the right to control another person’s body, and a mother’s love does not make her omniscient. Their unresolved accounts challenge the ideal of motherhood as natural, uniform, and self-explanatory.