Narrative, Psychoanalysis,
Feminism Marianne
Hirsch
Excerpts on the Purposes
and the Main Arguments
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本書主旨與
p. 2 This book foregrounds the "other woman," the mother, in relation to the "other child," the daughter. The myths we read and take to be basic determine our vision of how individual subjects are formed in relation to familial structures. Freud's optic was determined by the story he took to be central, the story of Oedipus. Other mythologies, the stories of Iphigenia, Electra, and Clytemnestra, of Demeter and Persephone, or of Antigone, for example, suggest alternate economies which may shape different plot patterns. They revolve around mothers and daughters as well as around brothers, sisters, and fathers. Even here, however, as we turn from the story of mother and son to the stories of mothers and daughters, Jocasta's silence is not radically reversed. p. 3 This book takes as its point of departure the intersection of familial
structures and structures of plotting, attempting to place at the center
of inquiry mothers and daughters, the female figures neglected by psychoanalytic
theories and submerged in traditional plot structures. It concentrates on novels by nineteenth- and twentieth-century
women writers from the Western European and the North American traditions,
reading them with psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation in the
context of the narrative conventions of realism, modernism, and post-modernism.
Thus its aim is to reframe the familial structures basic to traditional
narrative, and the narrative structures basic to traditional
conceptions of family, from the perspectives of the feminine and, more
controversially, the maternal.
My
book traces the transformations, within narrative conventions, psychoanalytic
theories, and feminist thinking, which enable the silent Jocasta
gradually to give way to the vocal Sethe.
Through the voices of daughters, speaking for their mothers,
through the voices of mothers speaking for themselves and their daughters,
and, eventually perhaps, through the voices of mothers and daughters
speaking to each other, oedipal frameworks are modified by other psychological
and narrative economies. Thus the plots of mothers and daughters do
not remain unspeakable.
Mothers,
Daughters, and Narrative
p. 9 Especially in the nineteenth century the plot of heterosexual romance and marriage structures the novels of women writers, even if its conventional sequence is variously subverted. By concentrating on the relationship between mothers and daughters, I interrogate and reframe these plot patterns in particular ways, discovering not only certain ideologies of maternity embedded within them, but also narrative patterns which call the more conventional constructions of the love plot into question. I have decided to use Freud's notion of a "Familienroman"—a "family romance"—as a controlling figure in these analyses. In Freud's terms, the family romance is an imaginary interrogation of origins, an interrogation which embeds the engenderment of narrative within the experience of family. Through fantasy, the developing individual liberates himself from the constraints of family by imagining himself to be an orphan or a bastard and his "real" parents to be more noble than the "foster'' family in which he is growing up. The essence of the Freudian family romance is the imaginative act of replacing the parent (for boys clearly the father) with another, superior figure. In using the term family romance, I retain Freudian definitions as reference points but reframe them to be more broadly applicable. My aim is to focus at once on the discursive and imaginative role that the family plays in our narratives and the particular shape and nature of familial structures in particular narratives and social contexts. The family romance describes the experience of familial structures as discursive: the family romance is the story we tell ourselves about the social and psychological reality of the family in which we find ourselves and about the patterns of desire that motivate the interaction among its members. The family romance thus combines and reveals as indistinguishable the psychological subjective experience of family and the process of narrative. As Julia Kristeva says: "Narrative is, in sum, the most elaborate kind of attempt, on the part of the speaking subject, after syntactic competence, to situate his or her self among his or her desires and their taboos, that is at the interior of the oedipal triangle." The family romance is a structure of fantasy—the imaginary construction of plots according to principles of wish fulfilment. The notion of family romance can thus accommodate the discrepancies between social reality and fantasy construction, which are basic to the experience and the institution of family. Mother/Daughter Plot The family romance is a structure of fantasy—the imaginary construction of plots according to principles of wish fulfilment. The notion of family romance can thus accommodate the discrepancies between social reality and fantasy construction, which are basic to the experience and the institution of family. p. 10 Although Freud defines a particular shape of the family romance as universal, I find biases, both androcentric and ethnocentric, in his definition. I argue that patterns of family romance can and do vary, for male and female writers, during different periods and for different cultural traditions. This book traces some of the variations family romances have undergone in a number of nineteenth and twentieth-century texts. Yet, even the variations I have found follow certain circumscribed patterns. By replaying classic mythic paradigms which serve as their models (Electra, Antigone, and Demeter), and which I discuss in some detail in the book's Prelude, these alternate plot patterns go beyond Oedipus, yet show that variations of the family romance in the Western European and North American novel are, in many ways, still classic ones. If the Freudian family romance reflects not only psychologically valid patterns but also, as I argue, the patterns of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional plots, then female and feminist family romances necessarily situate themselves in a revisionary relationship to the Freudian pattern, with the fictional heroine often having to occupy both the position of subject and that of object in the narrative. Revisions reframe the basic paradigm to include the stories of daughters and eventually also the stories of mothers, but, ultimately, they do not entirely reframe the basic conception of family as static structure, of the relationship of familial patterns and narrative patterns, of triangles as fundamental figures in familial interaction. This book explores, then, both the potentials and the limitations of certain psychoanalytic terms and concepts for a feminist analysis of women's writing and the persistent adherence of women's plots to the terms identified in classical mythology and psychoanalytic theory. By using the notion of family romance, I treat both motherhood and daughterhood as story—as narrative representation of social and subjective reality and of literary convention. I would argue that in conventional nineteenth-century plots of the European and American tradition the fantasy that controls the female family romance is the desire for the heroine's singularity based on a disidentification from the fate of other women, especially mothers. In modernist plots, this wish is supplemented by the heroines' artistic ambitions and the desire for distinction which now, however, needs to include affiliations with both male and female models. In post-modernist plots, other fantasies of a more multiple relational identity emerge, including the stories of mothers who by definition are entangled in relations which define and circumscribe all further desire. All of these variations, however, are based on the heroines' refusal of conventional heterosexual romance and marriage plots and, furthermore, on [p. 11] their disidentification from
conventional constructions of femininity. Mothers—the ones who are not
singular, who did succumb to convention inasmuch as they are mothers—thereby
become the targets of this process of disidentification
and the primary negative models for the daughter. At
the same time, however, mothers and other women increasingly appear
in these novels as alternate objects of desire, suggesting other
possible subjective economies based in women's relationships. Eventually,
mothers begin to appear as subjects. The
notion of family romance, extrapolated from Freudian definitions and
extended beyond them, can account for the ambivalences and duplicities
contained in the fantasy of difference and singularity, the pull toward
complicity, and the difficulties of dissent. It accounts for the process
of "becoming-woman," of en-genderment,
which is intimately tied to the process of transmission and the relationship
to previous and subsequent generations of women. It traces both the
story of women's "consent to" and dissent from "femininity''[de
Lauretis], and the process of what Althusser
has called "interpellation"
and the process of conscious resistance against it. And,
as subsequent chapters will demonstrate, the
structure of family romance, with its conjunction of desire and narrative,
is operative both in fictional and in theoretical writings, including,
of course, my own book. I
realize that my own relationship to psychoanalytic terms and concepts,
and to certain familial patterns and fantasies, is an ambivalent one.
Although I question the flexibility of psychoanalytic frameworks, I
do so, for the most part, from within them, keenly aware of their compelling
usefulness for feminist analysis of femininity as culturally constructed
and internalized by individual female subjects. This section's very
subtitle, for example—Mothers, Daughters, and Narrative—repeats
the triangular structure of the nuclear family, with narrative occupying
the place of the paternal. The book's structure is also
tripartite. At the same time, the book longs for other economies
and other figures. It longs for a space in
which maternal subjectivities could be articulated and for the means
of politicizing the psychological and the familial; both of these goals
conflict with some basic psychoanalytic assumptions. I believe
that the tension introduced by this ambivalence motivates the book's
dynamic progression in ways that are both conscious and unconscious.
The strategy of reading theoretical texts as fictions and of reading
theoretical fictions along with literary ones, moreover, has the effect
of allowing them to illuminate each other so that they can reveal deeper
cultural desires in given historical moments. p. 12 . . . all positions within the family must be probed from all directions, including that of mothers and daughters. Yet, the fundamental question that underlies these individual analyses is whether it is possible to arrive at a genuine critique of psychoanalytic assumptions and of familial ideologies from a vantage point which, of necessity, shares even some of these assumptions. In this book these questions are posed
in relation to maternal discourse. I believe that a thorough transformation
of basic conceptual paradigms from a feminist perspective needs to include
all women, mothers as well as daughters. Yet I find that while psychoanalytic
feminism can add the female child to the male, allowing women to speak
as daughters, it has difficulty, even more generally, theorizing, beyond
childhood, the experience of adulthood. But,
so long as the figure of the mother is excluded from theory psychoanalytic
feminism cannot become a feminist psychoanalysis. Because of its concentration on mothers as well as on women and daughters, my argument offers a particular vantage point within the current debate among feminists about the female subject and the meaning of femininity. First, by distinguishing between female positions—childless woman and mother, mother and daughter—it challenges the notion of woman as a singular, unified, transparent category. The multiplicity of "women" is nowhere more obvious than for the figure of the mother, who is always both mother and daughter. Her representation is controlled by her object status, but her discourse, when it is voiced, moves her from object to subject. But as long as she speaks as mother, she must always remain the object in her child's process of subject-formation; she is never fully a subject. Second, the figure of mother is determined by her body more intensely than the figure of woman. By taking on the notion of essentialism so directly—maternity, inasmuch as it is represented as biological, poses the question of the body as pointedly as is possible—this book is able to look again at what feminists have hidden from view in both assertions and rejections of essentialism. It is easy to grant that neither sex nor gender can be invoked as fixed or unproblematic categories. It is more difficult to assert that reproduction provides a radical arena of difference——and more than merely biological difference—and that it thereby challenges a positional, destabilized view of sex and gender more than perhaps anything else. The perspective of the maternal makes it difficult simply to reject the notion of biology and forces us to engage both the meaning of the body and the risks of what has been characterized as essentialist. This is equally true for adoptive mothers whose bodies, I would argue, are equally engaged in the process of mothering although they have not given birth to children. Third, the focus on mothers and daughters redefines the notion of difference. Difference here is not merely gender difference. It encompasses p. 13 the (maternal) difference within the feminine and the multiple differences within the maternal, the differences among women, the individual woman's difference from Woman and even from other women, and the difference of maternal plots and stories from conventional romance plots. What is a mother? and what is maternal? are questions that underlie every page of this book without ever being answered directly. In fact, I generally prefer the adjectival term "maternal" because it signals that there is no transparent meaning of the concept. In the chapters that follow, moreover, I take neither the notion of "experience" nor that of "identity" as given, but find that the focus on the maternal makes it imperative to use and to attempt to theorize both. These questions of definition—of motherhood, experience, and identity in relation to sex and gender—have acquired particular urgency throughout the time of my work on this book, and especially recently, in connection to the feminist debates over reproductive technologies. I believe that feminists need to clarify their positions on motherhood, particularly at a moment when science and the legal system are themselves engaged in a process of charting the definitions and rights of children, fathers, and mothers. The Baby M case, for example, has forced feminists to scrutinize their most fundamental assumptions as they confront impossible decisions between Mary Beth Whitehead, the birth mother (or the surrogate, the natural, the contract mother, depending on which position one takes) and Elizabeth Stern, the wife of the biological father (the adoptive mother, or the surrogate mother); between the rights of biological mothers and of biological fathers; between the "best interests" of children, or the "best interests" of mothers. The questions raised by this one case represent the most basic clash between biology and law, essentialism and constructivism. And as we begin to take into account the economic conditions of the Sterns and Whitehead, and of the lawyers who benefit from the legal confusions concerning the definition of maternity, we confront the variables of income level and class as they impinge on conceptual systems and social realities. As feminists try to decide about more complex technologies, such as in vitro fertilization, other variables intrude
and other forms of oppression and appropriation become possible—poor
and third world women renting their wombs to rich, first world women,
for example. What does the term mother, what does the term father
mean in this context? And how do these terms relate to bodies which
are being transformed through technology, to laws which displace those
bodies, to experiences displaced by these laws? Although it is unlikely
that feminists will reach a comfortable consensus on these issues, it
is crucial that we understand the terms of the argument, and to do so
we must scrutinize motherhood from personal, subjective, legal, psychological,
biological, economic, historical, and technological vantage points.
章節摘要
After
a discussion of mythic "Origins and Paradigms" in the book's
Prelude I start my analysis with the work of nineteenth-century women p 15 writers because I believe that motherhood as a concept is historically determined in ways that are parallel to the notion of childhood. As Ann Dally argues: "There have always been mothers, but motherhood was invented." She cites 1597 as the first entry for "motherhood" in the Oxford English Dictionary, and then only as fact rather than ideology. The ideology of motherhood as the ideal of femininity coincides with the institutionalization of childhood during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As representations of the child's vulnerability and need for nurturing and protection became more prominent, motherhood became an "instinct," a "natural'' role and form of human connection, as well as a practice. As the private sphere was isolated from the public under industrial capitalism, and as women became identified with and enclosed within the private sphere, motherhood elevated middle-class and upper-class women into a position of increased personal status, if decreased social power. In a largely technological and impersonal public world, motherhood came to represent, as Elisabeth Badinter puts it, "a repository of society's idealism" (p. 180); it became the force of conservation of traditional values. The focus of this ideology of the maternal, however, was not the mother but the child, that delicate and vulnerable organic being who required complete devotion and attention. Theories of child development and education, from Rousseau's work on, contain conflicting notions of the child's "best interests"—on the one hand, the "natural" mother-child connection, on the other, professional, often male-devised, educational strategies. In either case, however, the maternal role was figured in ways that are ultimately debilitating to women—equally so to those women who could afford to try to live up to the social ideal of maternity and to those who because of economic necessity could not. The mother became either the object of idealization and nostalgia or that which had to be rejected and surpassed in favor of allegiance to a morally and intellectually superior male world. What interests me in Part I of this book is how, within this ideological context and within the context of the conventions of realism, mothers and maternity are represented in the work of women writers who stand both inside and outside those conventions. Not surprisingly I find, in chapter 1, that mothers tend to be absent, silent, or devalued in novels by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Sand, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Kate Chopin. The conventions of realism, resting on structures of consent and containment, shut out various forms of indeterminacy, instability, and social fragmentation, including, I argue, maternal perspectives and experiences. The repression of the maternal leads women writers and fictional heroines to construct the "female family romance," based on fraternal rather than maternal attachments. I illustrate this pattern in a close reading of Austen's Emma in relation to Freud's "Family Romances." The chapter proposes that the nineteenth-century heroine, determined to shape a different plot for herself, tends not only to be separated from the figure and the story of her mother, but herself tries to avoid maternity at all costs. p. 15 . . . Part II moves from realism to modernism, from the nineteenth-century cult of "true womanhood" to post World War I emancipation. It moves as well to a social context in which, because of significant medical advances in birth technology and contraception, motherhood is less life-threatening and more of a choice for women. Chapter 3 traces the emergence of the mothers as central figures in the daughter-artists' texts and the contradictions in the women artists' liminal position between maternal/female and paternal/male affiliations. Freud's essays on femininity and the importance of pre-oedipal mother-daughter connection, published during the 1920s, and Virginia Woolf's analysis of the position of the woman writer in A Room of One's Own form the background to readings of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Colette's Break of Day, and Edith Wharton's The Mother's Recompense. These novels conjoin, uneasily, the narrative of mother-daughter attachment and the plot of heterosexual romance. The chapter explores some connections between gender and modernism, suggesting that for women writers contradiction and oscillation, rather than repetition, bind the modernist plot. Part III moves
from the 1920s to the 1970s and 80s and from modernism to post-modernism.
Chapter 4 looks at feminist fictions and theories emerging in the 1970s
and at their representations of female subject-formation in relation
to mother-daughter relationships. Adrienne
Rich's essay "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision"
serves as a paradigm for this feminist relation to the past. What I
call the "feminist family romance" appears in psychoanalytic
re-visions of Freudian paradigms, which highlight mother-daughter bonding
as a basis for a vision of gender difference and female specificity.
This family romance pattern takes on different, less idealized shapes
and valences in fictional texts which are more specifically contextualized
and historical situations. Margaret Atwood's Surfacing,
Marguerite Duras's The Lover, and Christa
Wolf's Patterns of Childhood form the subject of textual
analysis. The fictional and the theoretical texts I discuss in this
chapter feature mothers prominently, and displace fathers, brothers,
husbands, and male lovers. The texts themselves, however, are still
written from daughterly perspectives.
Chapter
5 specifically explores points at which feminist discourse situates
itself at a distance from the maternal and points at which a maternal
discourse emerges. The feminist reliance on psychoanalytic frameworks
begins to seem particularly problematic in relation to the feminist
silencing p.
16 of the mother. In analyzing the confrontation of maternal and daughterly voices in Toni Morrison's Sula and Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," and in coming back to Morrison's Beloved, I perceive a discourse of identity and subject-formation which goes beyond oedipal patterns and the terms of psychoanalytic discourse. Such a discourse might be able both to reverse the erasure of the mother and the daughterly act of "speaking for her" and to create the conditions in which mother and daughter would each be able to speak for themselves as well as for and with one another. It is significant, I believe, that I find examples of this discourse in the texts of American women of color, writers
who clearly identify themselves as a new feminist generation in relation
to the maternal tradition of the past, writers for whom fathers, brothers,
and husbands occupy a less prominent place, writers who are in a more
distant relation to cultural and literary hegemony.
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