In uncertain terms: Mothering without guilt in Marie Darrieussecq's Le Mal de mer and Christine Angot's Léonore, toujours

Esprit Createur

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 5-15

  Rye, Gill ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61249280352     PISSN: 00140767     EISSN: 19310234     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/esp.2010.0477     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot; Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U P, 1989).
2. The Mother/Daughter Plot, 16. Hirsch suggests that Black American women writers define themselves as writers through connections with a maternal genealogy (176-77).
3. Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001);
4. Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (London: Fourth Estate, 2001);
5. Marie Darrieussecq, Le Bébé (Paris: P.O.L., 2002).
6. See Abigail Gregory and Ursula Tidd, ed., Women in Contemporary France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000).
7. See Elisabeth Badinter, L'Amour en plus: histoire de l'amour maternel (XVIIe-XXe siècle) (Paris: Flammarion, 1980).
8. See Shari L. Thurer, The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994);
9. Diane Eyer, Motherguilt: How Our Culture Blames Mothers for What's Wrong with Society (New York: Times Books, 1996). In psychoanalysis, the Freudian superego renders guilt part of the structure of the psyche and therefore of normal development.
10. See D.W. Winnicott, "Psycho-Analysis and the Sense of Guilt (1958)," in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (Madison, CT: International U P, 1994 [1965]), 15-28, in which guilt is connected to feelings of ambivalence. This could usefully inform the notion of maternal guilt, but Winnicott's text is itself a good example of guilt-inducing discourse, in its laying of blame for so-called anti-social behaviour firmly at the door of failure in primary (maternal) childcare (28).
11. See Elisabeth Roudinesco, La Famille en désordre (Paris: Fayard, 2002).
12. Marie Darrieussecq, Le Mal de mer (Paris: P.O.L., 1999);
13. Christine Angot, Léonore, toujours (Paris: L'Arpenteur Gallimard, 1994; Fayard, 1997).
14. Marie Darrieussecq, Truismes (Paris: P.O.L., 1996).
15. For discussion of the polarity of responses to Truismes, see Catherine Rodgers, '"Entrevoir l'absence des bords du monde' dans les romans de Marie Darrieussecq," in Nouvelles écrivaines: nouvelles voix?, Nathalie Morello and Catherine Rodgers, ed. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), 86.
16. See my '"Il faut que le lecteur soit dans le doute': Christine Angot's Literature of Uncertainty," Dalhousie French Studies (edited special issue, "Hybrid Voices, Hybrid Texts: Women's Writing at the Turn of the Millennium"), 60 (Fall 2004): 117-26.
17. See Luce Irigaray, Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère (Montreal: Editions de la pleine lune, 1981).
18. Julia Kristeva, "Le Temps des femmes," 3444, 5 (Winter 1979): 16.
19. See also Susan Rubin Suleiman, "Writing and Motherhood," in Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard U P, 1994), 13-37, which concerns the "struggle" of the mother-writer against maternal guilt.
20. Indeed, the US translation of Le Mal de mer is entitled Undercurrents: A Novel, Linda Coverdale, trans. (New York: The New Press, 2001).
21. This possibility among others is suggested in Guylaine Massoutre's review of Le Mal de mer, "Femmes sur un paysage: les nausées de Marie Darrieussecq," in Le Devoir (1-2 May 1999).
22. Although this interpretation to some extent reinforces the opinion that a mother who gives up her child cannot be acting 'normally,' the notion of crisis is also emerging as a clear theme in Darrieussecq's fiction. See Shirley Jordan, "Saying the Unsayable: Identities in Crisis in the Early Novels of Marie Darrieussecq," in Women's Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s, Gill Rye and Michael Worton, ed. (Manchester: Manchester U P, 2002), 142-53.
23. Marie Darrieussecq, Précisions sur les vagues (Paris: P.O.L., 1999).
24. For a different reading, which emphasizes danger and risk in the sea imagery, see Tiphaine Samoyault, "Mer cannibale," Les Inrockuptibles (17 March 1999). Likewise, Jordan suggests that the sea "embod[ies] the mother as ambiguous, fearful force" (Jordan 151).
25. "Il faut que le lecteur soit dans le doute. Dans la littérature, on part avec l'idée que tout est mensonge et une fois plongé dans le livre, on prend tout pour acquis. Moi je fais le contraire: je dis, tout est vrai mais ne prenez rien pour acquis," Thierry Guichard, "En littérature, la morale n'existe pas," interview with Christine Angot in Le Matricule des Anges, 21 (November-December 1997), http://www.lmda.net/mat/MAT02127.html (accessed 9 February 2005).
26. Angot's first two novels were Vu du ciel (Paris: L'Arpenteur Gallimard, 1990)
27. and Not to be (Paris: L'Arpenteur Gallimard, 1991).
28. See, for example, the review of Angot's work by psychologist Denise Vincent. "Il est difficile de supporter ses extravagances à propos de sa fille. L'amour maternel justifie-t-il n'import quoi?," "Christine Angot L'Inceste," http://www.epsyweb.com/regard/angot- regard.htm (accessed 23 July 2004). Thanks to Keith Reader for bringing this article to my attention and for discussion of Angot's work.
29. In Freud, fantasy is largely associated with wish-fulfilment as the staging of desire; however, it may also be a function of the working-through of anxiety, "a complex articulation ... in a shifting field of wishes and defences." Victor Burgin, "Fantasy," in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, Elizabeth Wright, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 87.
30. Interestingly, Winnicott posits the creative artist who is able to "[obviate] the need for guilt-feeling" (Winnicott 26) as, according to Adam Phillips, an "ego-ideal . . . [who] has the courage of his perversions." Adam Phillips, "On Risk and Solitude," in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993), 36-37.
31. See also Suleiman's "Writing and Motherhood," in which writing as maternal aggression in a story by Rosellen Brown is a "momentary triumph" of "aggression" (the writer) over "tenderness" (the mother) - momentary "because the anguish and guilt that inevitably attend the real-life mother's fantasy of writing as aggression against her child are absent" (34). In Léonore, toujours, Angot's narrator does, more conventionally, express guilt the first time she leaves her baby daughter with her mother (76).
32. Julia Kristeva, "Maternité selon Giovanni Bellini," Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 409-35.