The irony of modern man's desire to disembody himself is underlined by the fact that North Americans are pathologically overweight and obsessed with the mechanics of sex.
Doyle divides her five authors into three categories based on their novels' "narrative tendencies": "late Romantic" (Toomer and Joyce), in which the novels mock the ideal of "pure" maternity by foregrounding racially and sexually transgressive mother figures and allowing their alienated voices to be heard; "interruptive" (Ellison), in which the narrator attempts repeatedly to excise the mother figure and, in doing so, to disembody himself, producing a gap-ridden narrative structure; and "intercorporeal" (Woolf and Morrison), in which the narration begins with the mother's body but then moves outward through the objects of the material world inhabited by the mother and other characters to construct a non-mother-centered embodiment.