The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism

by Marianne Hirsch

Maternal repression is at the basis of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Only with modernism does the mother become a central figure-both celebrated and ambivalent -in daughter-artist's text and family romance. For modernist heroines, psychoanalytic theories of femininity of the 1920s and the 1930s, as well as the novels of Woolf, Colette, and Wharton, show painful oscillations and contradictions between maternal and paternal identifications. Hirsch argues that fictional and theoretical feminist writing still situates itself at uncomfortable distance from the maternal: the concrete stories of mothers are still unspeakable or as Alice Walker says, 'cruel enough to stop the blood.' They point to a feminist discourse of identity which begins with mothers and thereby reframes our conception of self, family, and plot.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Essays, Psychology, 20th Century, Theory

Paperback

First published January 8, 1989

About the author

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Co-Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference, at Columbia University. She is the author of Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, among other books. Leo Spitzer is Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History Emeritus at Dartmouth College, and the author of many books, most recently Hotel Bolivia: A Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism."

Reviews

[zoe k]

This book is like the final boss where all the classics come together and are analyzed through a Freudian lens

[sarah ☆]

che noia

[Sherah]

This book takes a strong psychoanalytic standpoint, and much of the argument is now dated. It is still essential reading in the field.