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Mother-Daughter Plot
I. Introduction (Focus
and Aim)
Focus -- novels
by 19th-and 20th-century
women writers from the Western
European and the North American traditions.
Perspectives:
psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation in the context of the
narrative
conventions of realism, modernism, and post-modernism.
-- Freud's
notion of a "Familienroman"—a "family romance"—as a
controlling figure in the analyses
Aim:
-- “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.” p. 2
-- “ 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.” (8).
II. Mothers,
Daughters, and Narrative
Freud's Family Romance: p. 9
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.
. . . 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
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.
III. Mother-Daughter Plots p. 10 // the
plot of ‘en-genderment'; of women's ‘consent
to' and dissernt from femininity.
--19th century: female
family romance the
desire for the heroine's singularity based on a disidentification
from the fate of other women, especially mothers.
p. 14 –
1) Mothers tend
to be “absent, silent, or devalued” in novels by
Jane Austen, Mary
Shelley, George Sand, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Kate Chopin. 2) realism's repression of the maternal
perspectives and experiences. 3) women writers' and fictional heroines'
constructions
of the "female family romance," based on fraternal rather than
maternal attachments.
p.
28 -- Models: Electra and Antigone*
-- 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.
p. 15.--
These novels
conjoin, uneasily, the narrative of mother-daughter attachment and the
plot of
heterosexual romance.
p. 28
models: the story
of Demeter and Persephone
-- 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.
p. 15 --
"feminist
family romance" – 1) psychoanalytic re-visions of Freudian paradigms,
which highlight mother-daughter bonding as a basis for a vision of
gender
difference and female specificity. 2) more specifically contextualized
and
historical situations in fictional texts
p. 29 Jocasta,
Clytemnestra, and Demeter—suggest reasons for the absence of the
mothers.
Mothers' role -- the targets of this
process of
disidentification –with mothers and women as increasingly the alternate
target
of desire à Mothers can finally
speak.
Issues in the discussion of mothers'
roles:
1)
different positions of mothers' and daughters';
2) body
and reproduction;
3)
differences among mothers or definitions of motherhood and mothering.
What
is a mother and what is the maternal?
e.g.
the Baby M case.
4) The ideology of motherhood
–As Ann Dally argues: "There have always been mothers,
but motherhood was invented." 26
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.
[Ann
Dally, Inventing Motherhood: The
Consequences of an Ideal (New York: Schocken, 1983), p. 17.]
Part I.
REALISM AND MATERNAL SILENCE
Chapter I: Female
Family Romances
²
Monstrous
Mothers and Motherless Daughters
²
Female
Family Romances and the "Old Dream
of Symmetry"
²
Emma and
the "Man-Who-Would-Understand"
²
The
Avoidance of Maternity in Emma and The Awakening
Chap II: Fraternal
Plots:
Daniel Deronda – 1) the mother's
importance; 2) The novel's double
plot—Gwendolen's attempt to construct a life that is different from
that of her
mother's and other women's, and Daniel's search for his origins and the
discovery of his mission—allows us literally to see the fraternal
structure at
work, as fictional "brother" and "sister" battle over
textual ground, over the legitimacy of different versions of the family
romance
pattern.
Quotes and
Summaries--
Female Family
Romances and the "Old Dream of
Symmetry"
(Note: p. 54 “My argument
here is that nineteenth-century women writers' resistance to those
plots
existed but was limited, indeed, that they, like Freud, saw the woman's
story
through what Luce Irigaray has
called "the blind
spot of an old dream of symmetry," that is, through a
fundamentally
male economy of desire in which the woman is other but cannot be
different.” In note
31, Hirsch points out that according
to Irigaray, Freud
fails
to posit just such a primary femininity,
characterized by vulval, vaginal or uterine stages, in addition to
phallic
ones. This failure renders Freud guilty of the "blind spot of an old
dream
of symmetry," she claims.
Presence/Absence & Power/Lack)
p. 43 (Chap 1) – [a] “break
in female genealogy” determines both the realist heroines and the
nineteenth-century
women writers'. P. 50 Maternal repression stands at the very basis of
the
structure of plot.
p. 44: examples:
dead mothers-- Emma,
Persuasion, Wuthering Heights,
Jane Eyre, and Villette;
trivialized comic
mothers -- Pride and
Prejudice and The Mill on the Floss;
the malevolent yet
inconsequential mother in Valentine;
the miniaturized
maternal portrait—Frankenstein;
ineffectual,
silenced mothers -- Mansfield
Park,
Shirley, and Daniel
Deronda.
“Only at the end
of the century, in The Awakening,
do we encounter a protagonist who is herself a mother, who begins to
act out in
relation to her children the maternal absences other protagonists have
experienced only as daughters.”
Different
interpretations:1) motherlessness =
powerlessness, or freedom;
2) contradictions
between motherhood and
authorship.
3) M. Homan: the
daughters speak two languages.
à To what extent do
women writers,
having on the one hand to conform to the forms of nineteenth-century
realism,
and attempting on the other to imagine alternate plots for their
heroines, find
that they have to sacrifice the mother in this vacillation between
resistance
and compliance?
4) Narrative
Theories—gender-blind:
p. 50 e.g. George Levine-- realist novelists in the Victorian period
"wrote against the very indeterminacy they tended
to reveal."
p. 53
Peter Brooks: 1)
Plot as a form of desire; 2) repetition
as the basic of plot dynamic; plot movement as the movement "from
passivity to
mastery' which has to be delayed; 3) fort/da game, “in which the
subject learns
to cope with lack, namely the lack of the mother, in an elaborate
process of
substitution which is basic both to language and to the process of
narration.”
p. 54
Freud's 1908
essay "Family Romances."—escape from family authority: 'Family
Romance' (an excerpt here: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adoption/archive/FreudFR.htm
)
1. The meaning of "pater semper incertus est,
whereas the mother is
certissima"--> The father is always uncertain, whereas the
mother is
certain, meaning that in question of birth, we can
hardly be sure of
the father's identity, but the mother's certain. (Maybe the
recent technology
of DNA 比對
can solve this problem.)
2.
Freud's Family Romance as fantasy:
The above factor
triggers children's
imaginary family romance. Here family romance is specifically
defined as
post-Oedipal children's dream of having better
parents. This
fantasy satisfies or explains their need/desire to shift their
objects of
admiration from their parents to somebody else. In
other words, to
avoid feeling guilty, they imagine two plots (that of foundling and of
bastard).
It is also "an expression of the child's longing for the happy,
vanished
days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and
mother
the dearest and loveliest of women."
Freud first found this fantasy in patients, but
at
the time he wrote the article 'Family Romance' he sees it as a
universal wish
fulfillment.
²
two stages:
1) “foundling
plot”; First,
the child, feeling slighted and in competition with siblings, and
seeing that
his parents are not as unique and incomparable/as he had at first
supposed,
imagines that he might be a step-child or an adopted child.
2) “bastard plot”;
At
the second stage of the family
romance all children's play and daydreaming is
governed by the desire to
replace the biological parents with others of higher social standing.
3. Hirsch's discussion
of Family Romance on pp. 54-57:
1) She
uses Marthe Robert's Origins of the
Novel to extend the implications
of Freud's family romance, and argues that neither of
them pays
attention to gender difference, assuming that 'child' is
definitely a male
child. Therefore, on p. 56, she's points
out the necessity--for
the daughter--of the "death" of the mother, who can be an object of
fantasy for the boys but has always been 'a part of reality' for the
girls and impossible
for girls to fantasize over.
2) Hirsch's revisionist
interpretation of Female
Family romance starts on p. 57, where she says that
the maternal
repression "engenders" the plot of female growth.
p.
57 Thus the "female
family romance" implied in
Freud's essay is founded on the elimination of the mother and the
attachment to
a husband/father.35 According to
Freud's essay on
"Negation," however, the elimination of the mother is only a
recognition and corroboration of her overwhelming importance. Freud
illustrates
negation, the "intellectual acceptance of what is repressed" by
quoting a patient who says: "'You ask who this person in the dream may
have been. It was not my mother.' We emend this,"
Freud explains,
"so it was his mother.''
à Women's revision:
1. maternal repression engenders the
plot; 2. paternal alliance happens usually with another man, instead of
the
father-- in Adrienne Rich's terms it involves the female fantasy of
"the-man-who-would-understand."
This man would combine maternal nurturance with paternal
power; or it is
a brother whose “his fraternal/incestuous status can protect the
heroine from
becoming a mother and can thereby help her, in spite of the closure of
marriage, to remain a subject.”
à 3. [W]hereas the
male foundling and
bastard fantasies revolve around the self and guarantee the hero's
agency, the
revisionary fantasy of "the-man-who-would-understand" revolves around
the attachment to another person and can at best promise only a
mediated access
to plotting.
3
The Darkest Plots
Narration
And Compulsory
Heterosexuality
Parables
of
Exclusion
A
Fictional
World Where Boy Never Meets Girl
Discovering
The Pre-Oedipus
"An
Open and Unending Book": Colette's Break of Day
Dreadful
Passages: Woolf's To the Lighthouse
Plots
and
Modernisms
From
Daughter to Mother? Wharton's The Mother's Recompense
--focus: “It interrogates
the intersection
of the sex-gender system of the woman
writer, the narrative strategies she chooses, and the
distinctive shift in
cultural images of femininity which
marks the modernist moment and which can be gleaned from psychoanalytic
narratives emerging during the same period.”(93)
-- main argument: “I would argue that
for Woolf and Colette, and
for female modernists more generally, those "dark places" contain the
hidden narrative of the passionate attachment between mother and
daughter.
Moreover, modernist writing strategies, characterized by increased room
for
subjective representations of consciousness, allow this previously
hidden
narrative to come to the surface of women's fiction.”
(97)
In
this period, then, the mother-daughter narrative
tries to displace the narrative of heterosexual romance, tries to find
its own language and expressive medium,
but it cannot do so
entirely. Mother-daughter narratives are still subject to what Adrienne
Rich
has termed the institution of
"compulsory heterosexuality." 22
The term "oscillation" may serve
here as well, to describe the
complicated plots that emerge out of these shifting rivalries and
competing
affiliations.(98)
Quotes and
Summaries--
1.
Parable
of Exclusion: “A Room of One's Own”: 1) as Woolf's
parable of interruption, exclusion, and writing—her marginal position
in
Oxbridge—it “illuminates the locus of femininity and women's discourse
at the
particular moment of her narration, the 1920s.”p. 92; 2) a position of
oscillation—between the British Museum and the dining room in a women's
college;
also between her argument that female difference should be articulated,
and
that there should be a "some marriage of opposites": "It is
fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly
or
man-womanly" (p. 108).
p.
95 Both solutions—androgyny and male identification, on the one hand,
and the
act of "thinking back through our mothers," on the other—are frought
with contradiction and ambivalence.
à
Double consciousness in feminist criticism
too
p. 95 “Although the
language of
darkness and concealment is still used, the fictions themselves bring
the
"submerged'' plots to the surface, thereby creating dual, sometimes
multiple plots in which contradictory elements rival one another.”
2.
Discovering
the Pre-Oedipus –examples of
contradictions
A.
Freud's views of the repressed
"pre-historical," pre-oedipal mother-daughter attachment.
1.. the girl's shift [from
the mother-daughter bond]
-- is utterly crucial
for Freud inasmuch as the very idea of heterosexuality and his
definition of
adult femininity in culture depend on its successful completion; in his
words, it
demonstrates "how a woman develops out of a child with a bi-sexual
disposition" ("Femininity" (1933), vol 21:116).
--
she transforms her sexuality from an active (masculine) to a passive
(feminine)
one.
--
the attachment to the mother is the root of her latent neurosis.
2. Viewed from the
Oedipal perspective;
3. Freud later
acknowledges that his female colleagues have better access to female
psychology.
B. Klein, Karen
Horney and Helene Deutsch's focus on the
pre-Oedipal and female sexuality
1. Klein – sees the
development away from mother as “motivated through a
"natural" and innate tendency toward heterosexuality. This
hypothesis divorces sexuality from reproduction and grants women a
primary
sexual impulse.” (p. 100)
2. Horney – “primary
femininity”, marked
by “vaginal sensations, genital anxiety, and reproductive pleasure.” Horney's
essay begins with a brief discussion of female pleasure, but it then
moves to a
long discussion of the "flight from womanhood." “She embraces for
women a passionate heterosexual orientation and an androgynous male
identification.”
3.
Although she firmly upholds the Freudian telos, Deutsch's term
"oscillation" adumbrates the forces of female identification and
maternal attachment which continually undermine it.
C. On narrative
structure:
If
the female Oedipus is perceived to take a different, more complicated,
circuitous form, then narrative structures adopted by women writers
should
reflect some of these complications.
Narrative elements of
oscillation: the
oscillations between maternal and paternal attachments as well as the
multiple
repressions of the female developmental course. Pre-oedipal closeness
to the
mother, oedipal separation and attachment to the father, the subsequent
transfer of that attachment to another male love object and the wish
for a
child
D. Mythic
prototype: The Demeter myth
illustrates well the complicated intersections of gender and plot
raised by
these texts
-- Persephone's allegiance is
split between mother and husband, her posture
is dual.
--
The
repeated cycle relies not on reconciliation, but on continued
opposition to
sustain and perpetuate it.
* Some Names of Greek
mythology:
ORESTES,
son of Agamemnon and CLYTEMNESTRA
ELECTRA, sister of ORESTES
CHRYSOTHEMIS, sister of ORESTES
Jocasta
(Oedipus' mother + queen)
daughters
of Oedipus:
ANTIGONE
ISMENE
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