“From an evolutionary point of view, we typically don’t think of the nose as very important,” said Dr. Gary Schwartz, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Arizona. “But it is stuck square in the middle of the face. Why would something that was less relevant to normal activities be so prominent? It implies there is something more important there than we have realized.”

 Indeed, scientists are learning that fragrance affects us more than previously thought. New research indicates that smells influence our minds, our moods and our bodies. Although we know a great deal about the eyes and ears, we only partly understand smell. According to Charles Wysocki, an olfactory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, we do know that an odor is first detected by the olfactory epithelium, a sort of receptor sheet located in the nose. This starts a chain of events that leads to an information flow to the olfactory bulb and limbic system of the brain, which plays a key role in regulating body functions and the emotions. Some of the most significant new findings about smell show that scents can keep people more alert and improve performance of a routine task. Subjects tackled a 40-minute vigilance test, which required them to watch a video screen and press a button whenever a certain line pattern appeared. While performing the task, some were intermittently given a whiff of peppermint or lily of the valley through oxygen masks. Scientists discovered that those workers receiving the fragrances performed 25% better than those given only whiffs of pure air. Although it isn’t clear exactly how fragrance works, it is believed that this finding may soon have practical applications. Truck drivers, even passenger car drivers, who need to keep alert while traveling long distances, could find it helpful.

        When contemporary women writers write about mother-daughter relationships, they often put an emphasis on forging a connection between them. In their writing, even though mothers and daughters do have ambivalence toward each other, they are often capable of resolving this problem and finally recognizing their bond as mothers and daughters. Yet, when it comes to writing about mother-son relationships, it becomes a completely different story. Most women writers stress the alienation between mothers and sons owing to the fact that they are of different gender. Therefore, when women writers write about their experiences of raising sons, they usually find themselves crossing over into a different territory. Feelings of apprehension and distress arise when mothers discover to their astonishment that their sons have become a total stranger to them especially when the sons have stepped into adulthood. In addition, since mothers are constrained by the society at large to avoid being too close to their sons in fear that they might smother their sons, contemporary women writers have depicted mostly the separation between them but have also unveiled how mothers come to terms with this separation from their sons. 

        Take the two contemporary novels, Margaret Forster’s Mothers’ Boys and Rosellen Brown’s Before and After, as examples. With a common theme on mother-son relationships, both novels portray a similar incident of a son who is suspected of committing a murder and how this unexpected event has profoundly harmed the mother-son relationships. Coincidently, both novels have an identical scene with a mother-son encounter in a juvenile prison. In this confrontation between mothers and sons, mothers have to their bewilderment come to realize that their sons have become unknown to them. And as these mother-son narratives continue to develop, the mothers and sons in these novels finally separate from each other. The only difference between these novels is their contrast in treating the mother-son relationship. Forster presents the mother as the one who takes up her traditional role by accepting passively this separation from son and waiting patiently until the son returns one day whereas Brown describes a mother who exercises her agency and power to deal with her son’s act of crime. Later, she not only fulfills her social responsibility as a mother but also decides her way of handling the mother-son separation. Despite that the two texts illustrate two conflicting ways of reading and writing mother-son relationships, they also inform us that there exists a powerful reading and writing against the grain.