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The Buried Madonna: Matricide, Maternal Power and the Novels of Michèle Roberts

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00497878.2013.772875

1547-7045

Ruth Cain,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1Roberts' statements about her writing's inspiration strongly recall Cixous: writing and birth represent "a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood" (CitationCixous 891). 2Sellers' argument about mythos and logos draws on the theories of Jacques Derrida, for whom (she writes) "the logos functions through a destructive dialectic of opposition, a strategy which is doomed to fail since the very process of demarcation and rejection means it is shaped by whatever it designates as its other and struggles to deny" (Myth and Fairy Tale 25). She emphasises the "radical potential" of the excess, or supplement, in the written text, "the system of differences whereby its meanings are produced [which] allows other possibilities to come to the fore"; an excessive, "feminine" text is an unguarded network that continually unfolds outwards towards others' (ibid.; see also CitationSellers Language ). 3In this context, there is a sinister significance to the story of a dead mother recently beatified by the Vatican, St. Gianna Beretta Molla, who chose to die rather than risk the life of her unborn child during surgery for cancer (CitationCruz). 4In Impossible Saints, Roberts plays with a more sacrosanct form, the hagiography or Life of the saint: official narratives whose formal and moral constraints are mocked and subverted by the surreal and often horrific short stories of fictional saints which form the alternate chapters, and in the "real" life of St. Josephine which the novel purports to relate. 5Other versions of this space in the novel are the warm room in which the child Josephine read by the fire with her mother, Beatrice (44), and the bed, a "warm tent of red hangings" (50) in which she plays sexual games with Magdalena: these fulfilling feminine enclosures stand in contrast to the draughty "junk cupboard" of the convent. 6Roberts has linked her own house in France, her mother's country of origin, to the recovery of maternal embodiment and plenitude (Roberts 175). However, she also remarks that her writing is concerned with anxiety-provoking questions about women and "home": "Does a woman belong in this world and is she allowed to have a house of her own? I realized only recently that all my novels feature homeless women, that novels are the paper houses I build, then inhabit" (171). 7Abraham and Torok discuss the lasting impact of early attempts to negotiate the loss of the loved maternal object, claiming that the infantile fantasy of incorporation of this object blocks the possibility of transforming her loss into symbol. Introjection, which Abraham and Torok suggest as the alternative to the sterile consumption of the object, is a "fructification" (CitationRand "Post-Script" 14) of object-loss, entailing acknowledgement and mourning of the loss so that it may become generative and productive. The incorporated object, which corresponds to the dead mother in Green's analysis, is the "anti-metaphor," the place of no representation or of "designification" (Rand 105). 8In Morrison's Beloved, an incomplete epitaph signifies Beloved's state of undeath (Morrison 5; CitationLuckhurst 247–8). 9In Luckhurst's analysis of incomplete mourning in Beloved, Beloved's solid yet undead body represents the impossible Real forcing itself in to the Symbolic (requiring a communal ritual of expulsion, or exorcism) (248–9). In Daughters, although the phantoms do not take solid shape and register instead as muttered fragments and nightmares, they perform a comparable function. 10Menstruation, seen as that pole of the cycle where the woman is for the time being infertile yet remains desirous/emotional/sexual, has been theorized as one of the most threatening aspects of female reproductive embodiment under patriarchal conditions. On the symbolic erasure of menstruation and the menstrual female body in literature and culture, see further CitationKerkham (2003). 11The questions raised by Luce Irigaray in response to Lacan's airy objectification of sublime female experiences of embodiment are very relevant here: "In Rome? So far away? To look? At a statue? Of a saint? Sculptured by a man? What pleasure are we talking about? Whose pleasure? For where the pleasure of the Theresa in question is concerned, her own writings are perhaps more telling" (91). 12In Kristeva's formulation this double-bind traps women in particular, since they are likely to identify more fully with the mother: Black Sun 28–30.