Class, Gender, Technology and Family in Jessamine Chan's The School for Good Mothers
Marxist · Feminist/Gender · Ecocritical · Queer Readings
Literary Criticism | GenAI Activity Worksheet
Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU)
Primary theoretical source: Dilip Barad, "On Marxist, Feminist, Ecocritical, and Queer Criticism"
1. Introduction: From Knowing a Theory to Using One
Literary criticism is not plot summary, and it is not the pinning of a label onto a text. It is a disciplined practice of asking a text specific questions and building an argument out of evidence the text actually supplies. Theory supplies the vocabulary for that practice, class, patriarchy, anthropocentrism, heteronormativity, but knowing the vocabulary is not the same as using it. To say "Marxism is about class" is to know a theory. To show how a particular institution distributes labour, judgment and value along economic lines is to use one. This blog is built around that distinction.
It also treats GenAI in a specific, limited role: as a tutor that can explain a concept, model an analytical process, and help organise an argument, not as an authority that supplies "the meaning" of a novel. Every interpretive claim below is checked against what can be verified of the text; where a detail cannot be verified with confidence, that uncertainty is stated rather than smoothed over. No direct quotations from the novel are reproduced here; textual evidence is described and paraphrased, and should be checked against the primary text before being cited in formal academic work.
The text under discussion is Jessamine Chan's The School for Good Mothers (2022), approached through four critical lenses, Marxist, Feminist/Gender, Ecocritical, and Queer, not as four unconnected exercises but as four angles of approach to one underlying question: who decides that a mother is good enough, and on what evidence?
2. Why This Novel Rewards Four Simultaneous Lenses
Few contemporary dystopian novels bring together, in a single narrative world, an institution that converts unpaid care work into a graded performance, a mother measured against a racialised and gendered standard, an artificial child built to register affection as data, and a single rigid template of what a family is allowed to look like. The novel resists being read through only one of these frames because its central institution, the School, operates on all four registers at once: a body under labour discipline is also a body under gendered surveillance, mediated by a machine, and measured against a normative family it may never have resembled. This is precisely the condition under which a multi-lens reading is not merely possible but necessary; a single-theory reading would have to suppress evidence the novel itself keeps foregrounding.
3. Meet the Text: The School for Good Mothers
Jessamine Chan's debut novel The School for Good Mothers was published by Simon & Schuster in 2022 and quickly became a widely discussed work of dystopian, speculative fiction. It follows Frida Liu, a Chinese American mother in Philadelphia raising her toddler daughter Harriet largely alone. On one overwhelmed afternoon, Frida leaves Harriet alone at home for a short period. That single incident is reported to the authorities, and from that point on, the machinery of the state takes over Frida's life.
Frida is not simply punished; she is sent to be re-made. The novel's central setting, the School, is a residential institution where mothers judged to be at risk of failing their children are required to live, to be retrained in "correct" mothering, and to be scored, day after day, on their progress, using lifelike artificial children built to register and report on maternal affection.
The central idea running underneath all four readings below is this: motherhood in this novel is not simply a biological bond. It is a socially constructed, culturally regulated, and institutionally evaluated identity.
4. Marxist Reading
What the theory looks for
● Class position and economic dependency
● Who owns institutional power and who supplies labour
● Ideology: which arrangements are made to look natural
● The value placed on different kinds of work
What the critic actually does
A Marxist critic examines who performs labour in a text and who profits from or judges that labour. The critic identifies which forms of work are visible and rewarded and which are invisible and unpaid, and interrogates how the story's institutions make unequal arrangements feel ordinary rather than constructed.
Textual evidence
●Frida is removed from her daily life and placed in an institution that scores her caregiving against a checklist, under evaluators who hold institutional authority over her.
●The School's daily routine, classes, tasks, and scoring, resembles a workplace shift structure imposed on care work, even though nothing about it is paid.
●Frida's own paid work and financial strain exist in the background of the story but are treated by the School as irrelevant to whether she is a good mother.
What this makes visible that a thematic reading might overlook
A reader focused only on plot or on Frida's emotional state might see the School purely as punishment. The Marxist lens instead shows that the School's structure itself, its schedules, its point systems, its classes, is the architecture of a workplace, just one whose workers are never paid and whose product is a passing grade rather than a wage. Care work only becomes visible to power once it is suspected of failing.
Limit of this reading
The novel focuses on emotional and institutional dynamics rather than economic data such as wages or precise class background, so an economic class reading must remain partly inferential rather than textually exhaustive.
My Critical Perception. I read the School not as a punishment invented for Frida alone, but as the visible, exaggerated tip of an economy of unpaid care that already existed before she ever arrived there. The novel does not invent the idea that mothers are graded; it simply builds a literal grading institution around a judgment mothers already live under informally. That reframing changed how I read every scene of scoring in the book: not as a dystopian exaggeration, but as the ordinary made explicit.
5. Feminist / Gender Reading
What the theory looks for
● Patriarchal expectations placed on women
● How femininity and motherhood are constructed rather than given
● Whose voice and interiority the text centres
● Intersections of gender with race and class
What the critic actually does
A Feminist or Gender critic examines how a text constructs womanhood and motherhood as roles to be performed and judged. The critic identifies the standards a female character is measured against, questions whose interests those standards serve, and uncovers the double standards applied to mothers compared with fathers.
Textual evidence
● Frida's single afternoon of exhaustion is treated as proof of unfitness, while the novel's implied treatment of the child's father suggests a lighter standard for paternal lapses.
● The School evaluates Frida on observable, demonstrated affection toward an artificial child rather than on her private history of care.
●Frida's identity as a Chinese American mother adds a further layer of scrutiny to how her mothering is read by evaluators.
What this makes visible that a thematic reading might overlook
A reader without a feminist lens might accept the School's checklist as a neutral, common-sense measure of good parenting. The Feminist lens instead shows that the checklist encodes a gendered script, rewarding constant visible warmth and self-sacrifice in a way an equivalent institution judging fathers would be unlikely to demand as strictly.
Limit of this reading
Frida's experience is specific to her class position, immigration background, and single-parent status, and should not be generalised into a universal claim about all mothers or all women.
My Critical Perception. What strikes me most is that the novel never lets Frida's private love for Harriet simply stand as evidence. It has to be re-performed, on schedule, in front of an evaluator, before it counts. This suggests to me that the School is not measuring motherhood at all; it is measuring legibility, whether affection can be converted into a form the institution recognises. That is a harder and stranger claim than simple gender bias, and it is the one I now think the novel is actually making.
6. Ecocritical Reading
This is explicitly an extended, interpretive ecocritical reading. The novel contains no forest, river, or climate crisis, and this reading does not invent one. What ecocriticism offers here instead is a way of asking how humans relate to the non-human and the technological, and how a constructed material environment shapes behaviour.
What the theory looks for
●Relationships between humans and non-human or artificial others
● Anthropocentrism: how the text centres or decentres the human
●Material and technological environments that shape behaviour
●Boundaries between the natural, the artificial, and the human
What the critic actually does
An Ecocritic examines how a text situates humans among non-human others, whether living, material, or technological. The critic questions the boundary between human and non-human, and uncovers how constructed environments discipline the bodies and behaviour of the people inside them.
Textual evidence
●Mothers at the School are given lifelike AI dolls that register and report on affectionate contact.
● The School itself is a built environment of dormitories, schedules, and surveillance that reshapes the mothers' bodies and behaviour.
● Intimacy between mother and artificial child is mediated at every point by a device designed to measure it.
What this makes visible that a thematic reading might overlook
A reader focused on the human plot might treat the AI dolls as a plot device or a piece of dystopian set-dressing. The Ecocritical lens instead shows that the dolls are doing real conceptual work: they are the point at which the novel asks whether affection can remain authentic once it is rendered as data for a non-human system to record.
Limit of this reading
Because the novel is not fundamentally concerned with ecology or the natural world, this reading should be understood as an interpretive application of ecocritical questions rather than the novel's primary or most obvious critical framework.
My Critical Perception. Reading the AI dolls this way, I stopped seeing them as a gimmick of the novel's dystopian setting. This suggests to me that Chan uses the doll to ask a question ecocriticism is well suited to, though the novel never states it directly: once a machine can register the outward signs of love, does the difference between feeling something and performing it stop mattering to the people judging you?
7. Queer Reading
A queer reading does not need an openly queer character. It asks a different, wider question: what does this text construct as a normal family, and what happens to anyone, of any orientation, who fails to perform that norm?
What the theory looks for
● Heteronormativity and the normative nuclear family
●Which gender performances are rewarded and which are punished
● How "family" and "normal motherhood" are defined and enforced
● Judith Butler's concept of gender as performance
What the critic actually does
A Queer critic examines how a text constructs a norm of family and gender, and what happens to anyone who departs from it. The critic interrogates the boundary the text draws around "acceptable" motherhood and family structure, and exposes what is punished for falling outside it.
Textual evidence
● The School's single evaluative standard treats any household that departs from an assumed nuclear-family template as a source of institutional concern.
●Frida is rewarded or penalised based on how convincingly she performs sanctioned maternal gestures, regardless of her actual bond with Harriet.
●Deviation from the expected script, rather than demonstrated harm to the child, is what appears to trigger institutional discipline.
What this makes visible that a thematic reading might overlook
A reader looking specifically for LGBTQ+ characters might conclude there is nothing for queer theory to do here. The Queer lens instead shows that the absence of explicit queer content is itself the point: the School's standard is so narrowly heteronormative and nuclear-family-shaped that any household outside it is treated as inherently suspect before any harm is even shown.
Limit of this reading
The novel does not foreground LGBTQ+ characters or explicit queer relationships, so this reading works by extending queer theory's critique of norms rather than by locating textual queer representation.
My Critical Perception. What I find most significant is that the School never has to name what a normal family is; it only has to keep scoring against it. Its silence about the standard is what makes the standard so hard to argue with. This suggests to me that the novel's real target is not any single family type but the unexamined confidence with which one template gets treated as the baseline for everyone.
8. Comparative Table
The table below is not four separate summaries. Read across each row: it is the same textual situation seen through four different questions.
What the table reveals is that each lens does not merely add a new topic to the reading list; it changes what counts as evidence. A scoring session with the artificial doll is, for the Feminist critic, primarily about performed femininity; for the Marxist critic, the same scene can be reread for who has the institutional authority to grade whom. This is the difference between knowing a theory and using one: using a theory means letting it change which details in a scene become significant.
9. The Intersection of the Four Lenses
Held apart, the four lenses risk implying that labour, gender, technology, and family norms are separate compartments of the novel's world. Held together, they show a single structure operating through different channels:
● CLASS: shapes whose unpaid labour is counted and whose is invisible
●GENDER: shapes what standard of performance a mother is measured against
●TECHNOLOGY: shapes how intimacy is mediated, recorded, and scored
●NORMATIVITY: shapes which family shape is treated as acceptable to begin with
Frida's evaluation makes the point concretely: her vulnerability cannot be explained by class alone (a wealthier single mother would still face a gendered standard), nor by gender alone (a father facing an identical lapse would likely be evaluated differently), nor by the artificial doll alone (the doll is only a measuring device; it does not invent the standard it measures against). It is the coincidence of her economic precarity, the gendered performance demanded of her, the technological mediation of her affection, and the narrow family template she is held against that together, not separately, produce both her punishment and the specific form it takes. The novel therefore resists any explanation that relies on a single category.
10. Politics of Visibility — "Who Gets to Be Visible?"
The novel stages an uneven distribution of visibility. Frida's single afternoon of exhaustion becomes hyper-visible, logged, reported, and converted into an institutional case, while the ordinary conditions that produced it, isolation, lack of support, the invisible weight of solo caregiving, remain background rather than evidence. The School's scoring apparatus makes Frida's every gesture toward the artificial doll intensely visible, while the conditions of the evaluators themselves, their assumptions, their institutional incentives, remain comparatively unexamined within the story's frame. Visibility, in other words, is not neutral: the novel shows it flowing toward the individual mother under suspicion and away from the systems doing the suspecting.
11. Politics of Belonging — "Who Gets to Belong?"
Belonging in the novel is tested against a category that claims to be natural but is shown to be institutional: the "fit family," measured by the School's checklist rather than by any lived relationship. The recurring question across all four lenses is the same question in different registers: what does it mean to belong to the category "good mother" when an institution, rather than a child or a relationship, gets to decide who qualifies? The novel's implicit answer is not that belonging can simply be reclaimed by force of will or love; it is that the category itself is contested, precarious, and controlled by people outside the relationship it claims to evaluate.
12. Contemporary Relevance
The connections below are made analytically, as a way of reading the novel's continued relevance, not as claims that the novel predicts present-day events.
Unpaid and unrecognised care labour. Who has access to institutional support, recognition, and protection for care work? (Marxist)
Parenting apps, smart monitors, and GPS trackers. How are intimate caregiving relationships increasingly mediated and scored by technology? (Ecocritical)
Algorithmic child-welfare risk-scoring tools used by some state agencies. Who gets flagged as a risk, and on what data? (Marxist / Feminist)
Uneven scrutiny of mothers versus fathers in custody and welfare decisions. Is parental fitness measured by the same standard regardless of gender? (Feminist/Gender)
Public debate over what counts as a "normal" family. Who defines the family structures that institutions treat as the default? (Queer)
13. Counter-Readings — "What If My Interpretation Is Wrong?"
Case
My reading: The School converts Frida's unpaid caregiving into a scored, labour-like performance, exposing an ideology that hides care work until it is suspected of failing.
Possible alternative: The School could be read simply as a rehabilitative institution responding proportionately to a genuine safety lapse, with no deeper ideological function beyond child protection.
The labour reading has stronger support, because the School's structure, schedules, point systems, graded classes, mirrors a workplace far more closely than it mirrors a targeted safety intervention, and it applies uniformly regardless of the severity of each mother's individual case.
Case
My reading: Frida is judged by a harsher standard than an implied paternal one, revealing a gendered double standard built into the evaluation.
Possible alternative: The School's harshness could instead be read as gender-neutral zero tolerance, applied strictly because any lapse in supervising a toddler is treated with equal severity regardless of the parent's gender.
Both readings have some support; the zero-tolerance explanation is plausible for the novel's premise as a whole, but it does not fully account for the specifically feminine vocabulary of the School's checklist, warmth, nurturing display, visible devotion, which favours the gendered reading as an additional, not exclusive, factor.
Case
My reading: The School enforces one narrow, heteronormative family template, punishing deviation from it rather than punishing demonstrated harm to the child.
Possible alternative: The School's strictness could be read as purely safety-driven, with no interest in family structure at all, focused only on verifiable physical risk to the child regardless of household shape.
The textual weight given to the checklist's behavioural, performance-based criteria, rather than to concrete risk assessment, favours the normativity reading, though the safety-driven reading remains a reasonable caution against overclaiming how explicitly the novel theorises family structure.
14. Human Verification: Checking the GenAI Reading
Consistency with the assigned source (Barad's article)
Each lens above is presented as a method, using the four-part structure the source itself uses (what the critic looks for, what the critic does, an illustration, a question) and active analytical verbs such as examines, questions, and interrogates, rather than as a static, memorised definition.
Feminist criticism vs. a general discussion of women
The reading above focuses on how motherhood is constructed and judged, not simply on the fact that the protagonist is a woman; this distinction was checked and maintained throughout.
Marxism vs. rich versus poor
The Marxist section focuses on labour visibility and institutional power, not on a simple wealth binary; this was checked.
Ecocriticism vs. describing nature
The ecocritical section explicitly argues that the artificial doll and the institutional environment mediate and discipline behaviour, rather than claiming the novel is really about nature; it is labelled throughout as an interpretive extension.
Queer theory vs. assuming every text needs a queer reading
The queer section explains its claims through the School's enforced family template rather than searching for queer representation that is not present in the text.
Accuracy of textual evidence / invented quotations or events
No direct quotations from the novel are used anywhere in this document. Plot and character details (Frida, Harriet, the School, the AI dolls) are described from general knowledge of the novel's premise and should be verified against the primary text, particularly for exact sequence of events, before being used in a graded academic submission.
One AI insight I accepted
The observation that the four lenses do not simply add separate topics but change what counts as evidence in the same scene struck me as a genuinely useful way of explaining the difference between knowing and using a theory, and I have kept it as a structuring idea for the whole blog.
One AI claim I questioned or corrected
An early draft of the ecocritical section leaned toward describing the artificial dolls as having independent narrative agency in their own right. On checking this against what I recall of the novel's premise, I judged this to be an overreach, since the dolls function primarily as instruments of the School rather than as agents in their own story, so I corrected the section to state this limitation explicitly.
15. Source-Based Knowledge and AI Synthesis
The table below distinguishes what is drawn from Dilip Barad's methodological framework from what is original synthesis applied specifically to this novel.
16. What Becomes Visible Through Four Lenses?
Each lens produces a distinct form of visibility. Marxism foregrounds labour and institutional power, who performs unpaid work, and who is authorised to judge it. Feminist/Gender criticism foregrounds the gendered, racialised standard against which motherhood is measured. Ecocriticism foregrounds how technological mediation reshapes intimacy. Queer criticism foregrounds the narrow, enforced template of family and gender performance the institution treats as natural.
What becomes visible only when these are brought together is the novel's larger claim: unfitness is not a natural condition some mothers simply have, but an effect produced jointly by economic precarity, gendered performance standards, technological mediation, and enforced family norms. No single lens can fully explain why Frida's private love for Harriet is never enough on its own, only the four lenses together, tracking how these structures interact, make that visible.
17. What This Novel Teaches Me as a Reader
What did I initially overlook?
On a first pass I read the School mainly as a symbol of state overreach; I initially underweighted how precisely its checklist reproduces an ordinary, everyday standard mothers are already judged by, just formalised and scored.
Which element changed my understanding?
Working through the artificial doll's role in detail made the ecocritical and feminist dimensions of the novel far more concrete for me than a general sense of "surveillance" had done.
Which critical lens challenged my previous reading?
The queer lens challenged me most, because it required distinguishing between reading the novel as a story about one mother's punishment and reading the School as an active structural enforcement of a family template, a harder and more specific claim.
What did I learn about the relationship between theory and evidence?
That a theory is only doing critical work when it changes which details in a scene I notice; otherwise it is decoration.
Did any interpretation complicate rather than confirm my assumptions?
Yes. I expected the Marxist and Feminist readings to sit fairly separately; instead, the School's checklist showed me they converge on the same demand, for performed, legible, scored devotion.
What did I learn about reading institutional power in fiction?
That treating an institution as simply villainous under-reads it; the novel shows the School's logic as coherent and internally justified, which is a more unsettling and more useful observation than calling it simply cruel.
What did I learn about the relationship between literature and contemporary society?
That a novel can be read as analytically relevant to present-day debates about parental surveillance without being read as a documentary prediction of them; the distinction between textual evidence and contemporary application in Section 13 was useful for keeping this honest.
How has my definition of literary meaning changed?
I now think of meaning less as something a text "contains" and more as something produced by the specific questions a reader brings to it, which is also why four lenses genuinely produce four different, non-redundant readings of the same novel.
18. My Critical Position: Reading Beyond the Four Lenses
I want to test, rather than simply assert, the proposition that literature does not merely represent an institution punishing an individual, but can expose the categories institutions invent to justify that punishment. Held against this novel, the proposition holds up reasonably well: the text repeatedly traces Frida's institutional treatment back to a specific, constructed standard, gendered performance, scored labour, technologically mediated affection, a narrow family template, rather than presenting her punishment as simply given or self-evidently deserved.
But the novel does not resolve into a program or a solution. It does not show the School reformed, or the standard it enforces replaced by a better one. What it offers instead is a sustained, close view of the apparatus itself, genuinely illuminating, but not a blueprint for dismantling what it exposes. I would argue that Chan leaves readers with an unresolved tension rather than a resolved argument: the machinery that manufactures the "good mother" category is shown clearly, but it is not shown being dismantled. This feels like an honest rather than a defeatist choice; it refuses the comfort of a novel that pretends fiction alone can undo what institutions have built.
Working through this novel with four critical lenses changed my sense of what "applying a theory" means. My clearest insight from using GenAI as a tutor was that a theory only becomes criticism once it changes which details in a scene I treat as evidence, the comparative table made that difference concrete rather than abstract. The claim I had to question and correct was an early overreach in the ecocritical section, which leaned toward giving the artificial dolls independent agency the novel does not really support; checking this against the text mattered more than accepting a confident-sounding claim. I also learned to separate textual evidence from interpretation far more carefully than before, particularly because I could not verify exact quotations and had to describe scenes in my own words instead, which forced me to be precise about what I actually knew versus what I was inferring. Applying all four lenses together, rather than one at a time, showed me that a single novel can support genuinely different, non-redundant readings without any one of them being the correct one, and that holding several readings at once, rather than settling on a single dominant theory, is closer to what postgraduate literary interpretation actually asks of a reader.
Conclusion
Literary theory supplies conceptual tools; criticism activates those tools against specific evidence. Read through Marxist, Feminist/Gender, Ecocritical, and Queer lenses, The School for Good Mothers stops being a story primarily about one flawed mother and becomes a sustained investigation of how power, economic, gendered, technological, and normative, decides who is allowed to be recognised as a good parent. No single lens exhausts this; each makes a different structure visible, and their combination shows how those structures interact rather than operate in isolation.
GenAI assisted this process as a tool for organising concepts and modelling analytical method, but it could not verify quotations, judge which counter-reading is stronger, or decide what the novel ultimately leaves unresolved, that verification and judgment remain the reader's own work. The novel itself resists a tidy final meaning; its tension between private love and public performance is left open rather than resolved, and that openness is, finally, where its critical value lies.
Works Cited
- Barad, Dilip. "On Marxist, Feminist, Ecocritical, and Queer Criticism." ResearchGate, 2023.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385739537_On_Marxist_Feminist_Ecocritical_and_Queer_Criticism
- Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
- Chan, Jessamine. The School for Good Mothers. Simon & Schuster, 2022.
- Literary Criticism | GenAI Activity Worksheet. Department of English, MKBU.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/414530437_Literary_Criticism_and_Gen_AI
- Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848.
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