Rodgers, Julie (2021) Narrating the Final Loss: Scenes from the Maternal Deathbed in Gabrielle Roy's Le temps qui m'a manqué and Francine Noël's La femme de ma vie. L'Esprit Créateur, 61 (1). pp. 40-53. ISSN 1931-0234

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Abstract

AS ADALGISA GIORGIO REMARKS in her introduction to Writing Mothers and Daughters, "the mother-daughter dyad is still the dominant structuring principle of female identity in Western cultures."1 Prominent feminist theorists such as Nancy Chodorow and Adrienne Rich have illustrated in great detail the impact of this unique female-to-female relationship on the daughter's psychological and sexual development and, moreover, her own relationship to motherhood.2 It is generally agreed, however, that far from being an unproblematic cathexis, the mother-daughter bond is wrenchingly complex, so much so that Phyllis Chesler has labeled it "woman's stormiest love affair."3 In the field of literary studies, proponents of écriture féminine such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous view maternal symbiosis as a core feature of the daughter's text.4 Indeed, so pervasive is the presence of the mother in the daughter's narrative that Marianne Hirsch has identified a distinct genre of matrilineal literature, namely "the mother-daughter plot,"5 in which the daughter, via writing, is always thinking back through the mother in some respect. Lori Saint-Martin develops this concept further, arguing that the relationship between mother and daughter must be viewed as a powerful dynamic "qui se trouve à la source même de l'écriture au féminin et qui surdétermine les structures narratives et même, dans une certaine mesure, le langage."6 For scholars of matrilineal literature, the daughter's text emerges as an important space for maternal reconciliation in the aftermath of a rupture from the mother.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Rodgers, J. 2021, "Narrating the Final Loss: Scenes from the Maternal Deathbed in Gabrielle Roy's Le temps qui m'a manqué and Francine Noël's La femme de ma vie", L'Esprit créateur, vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 40.
Keywords:	Mother; Daughter; Dyad; Relationship;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures > French
Item ID:	18070
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2021.0003
Depositing User:	Julie Rodgers
Date Deposited:	25 Jan 2024 11:34
Journal or Publication Title:	L'Esprit Créateur
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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