| In writing the maternal, or the 'mother,' the authors in this dissertation have undermined the existence of a mold, as it were, of maternal behavior, the maternal instinct, and of the act of mothering. That is, the roles that the women play in the works I discuss here problematize the assumption that there even exists any universal 'coda' or standards of behavior by which all mothering practices should abide. Writing mothers in such a way works to denaturalize the association of the feminine to the female in language. What this will hopefully result in is a rethinking of essence in writing the maternal.;My project examines the ways in which, through language, the often universally delineated function of mother as woman, representation and institution is splintered, so to speak, to reveal wider open spaces that have yet to be analyzed.;Here are several mothers who come to the experience of mothering from very different vantage points. I have chosen seven twentieth century works of fiction, autobiography, and biography. By investigating the manner in which each author treats the role of the mother in the text, I forge a relationship between them. Jeanette Winterson, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, Sibilla Aleramo, Jane Lazarre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean Nathan each write from very disparate cultural circumstances as well as within various genres of literature, yet there is a certain continuum in each author's approach in narrating the maternal. That said, my project is a piecing together of many moving parts, and so it is necessary to offer some cultural context for each author.;One of the questions I try to answer pertains to who controls the narrative's trajectory? Is it the writer (narrator) or the subject? In this case the subject is usually the mother. That is, can a narrator daughter ever claim agency over the narrated mother in the text? I will also discuss the notions of genre and gender as they relate to the roles of women and power in language. To scrutinize the behaviors and language of mothers, daughters, mother figures, and maternal love is to consider whether or not there is such a thing as a female/maternal essence or nature.;My arguments are informed, in part, by two major works of philosophy and gender studies. Luisa Muraro's l'Ordine simbolico della madre and Christine Battersby's The Phenomenal Woman. I use these, among a few other critical works, to anchor certain arguments surrounding what I speculate are the authors' intentions in writing the maternal as fluid and flexible. My choice of texts and the claims I make also challenge some of the theoretical positions that Muraro and Battersby take, namely Muraro's stance about the role of language and the potentiality that language has to precisely identify and represent the mother.;For clarity's sake, it is important to note that the maternal figures rendered here are both fictional characters created via literature (as with Winterson's Dog Woman) as well as real life women whose lives have either been first person narrated (as in the case of Jane Lazarre, Sibilla Aleramo) narrated via the daughter (as we see with Jamaica Kincaid, Simone de Beauvoir, and Lois Gould,) and finally, via a third party narrator, as with Jean Nathan's work on Dare Wright.;What I will argue throughout this dissertation is that language and literature have the authority to expose the notion of the maternal instinct as a tyrant of a postulation, seeming to be rooted as much in behavior and society as it is in biology. Further, when we see behaviors by the mothers in these works that might otherwise be deemed a perversion of the mothering instinct, it is important to reconsider that the mother here serves more so as a trope, or, to clarify, a manifestation of language and culture, than actual tangible figures. As such, these mothers' maternal instincts, if you will, often take the shape of a conceptual chasm, and are frequently unreflective of reality. In this way, I claim, the entire notion of a maternal instinct is a construct in need of rethinking. |
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