Abstract
Taking off from two scenarios, this chapter will offer a two-part reflection on Chodorow’s profound influence on literary study and the new directions that influence might take. Coinciding with the feminist critical turn to women’s literary genealogies, dubbed “gynocriticism”, Chodorow’s Reproduction of Mothering provided a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the dynamics of women’s literary inheritance. These dynamics are echoed in Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own (1929), whose narrator famously proclaims that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” By making the psychoanalytic discourse of object relations available for literary study, Chodorow initiated a paradigm shift from the model of oedipal rivalry presumed to characterize masculine literary inheritance to the dynamics of merger and separation that characterize the mother–daughter relations between and within books authored by women. Forty years later, feminist critics accustomed to thinking back through our literary mothers are learning to think forward through the object world bequeathed by the death of our literal mothers. In this second scenario, in which it is our mothers who separate from us, lingering only in the things they leave behind, I ask how the “reproduction of mothering” might help us chart the material terrain of women’s object relations.
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Notes
- 1.
Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978).
- 2.
Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to the Tempest (London: Routlege, 1991).
- 3.
See, for example, Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
- 4.
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: Norton, 1976), 226.
- 5.
Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality” (1931), in Women & Analysis: Dialogues on Psychoanalytic Views of Femininity, ed. Jean Strouse (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974), 40.
- 6.
Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). See also Marianne Hirsch, “Mothers and Daughters,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1981): 200–222.
- 7.
The exemplary instance is This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981); for an analysis of this and other variants, see Cynthia G. Franklin, Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1997).
- 8.
See especially the implicit conversation between Nancy Chodorow in “Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective” and Jane Flax in “Mother-Daughter Relationships: Psychodynamics, Politics, and Philosophy,” both included in The Future of Difference, eds. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 3–19, 20–40. See also Jane Flax, “The Conflict between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relationships and Within Feminism,” Feminist Studies 4, no. 2 (June, 1978): 171–189.
- 9.
Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
- 10.
Judith Kegan Gardiner, “A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed in Women’s Fiction,” Feminist Studies 4, no. 2 (June, 1978): 146–165.
- 11.
Elaine Showalter, “A Criticism of Our Own: Autonomy and Assimilation in Afro-American and Feminist Literary Theory,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 226.
- 12.
See especially Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “‘Forward into the Past’: The Female Affiliation Complex,” in No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, eds. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New Haven: Yale, 1988), 165–226.
- 13.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 81.
- 14.
Joan Lidoff, “Fluid Boundaries: The Mother-Daughter Story, the Story-Reader Matrix,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35, no. 4 (Winter, 1993): 398–399. The essay is drawn from a manuscript, Fluid Boundaries: Maternal Echoes in Women’s Literary Voices, that was unfinished at Lidoff’s death in 1989.
- 15.
Judith Kegan Gardiner, Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Other twentieth-century writers who explore these fluid boundaries include Marilynne Robinson, Rosellen Brown, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Kim Chernin.
- 16.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1981), 209. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” In Jeanne Schulkind (ed.), Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1985), 81.
- 17.
Mark Twain, Letter to Rev. J.H. Twichell, January 19, 1897. The Letters of Mark Twain, 4, 1886–1900. Project Gutenberg, 2006. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3196/3196-h/3196-h.htm.
- 18.
“Up There” from COLLECTED POEMS by W.H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, copyright c. 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All Rights reserved.
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Freud, Sigmund, “Female Sexuality” (1931). In Women & Analysis: Dialogues on Psychoanalytic Views of Femininity, ed. Jean Strouse. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974, 40.
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Hirsch, Marianne, “Mothers and Daughters.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (Autumn, 1981): 200–222.
———, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Lidoff, Joan, “Fluid Boundaries: The Mother-Daughter Story, the Story-Reader Matrix.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35, no. 4 (Winter, 1993): 398–420.
Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. New York: Norton, 1976.
Schwartz, Murray and Coppélia Kahn, eds. Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
———, “A Criticism of Our Own: Autonomy and Assimilation in Afro-American and Feminist Literary Theory.” In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997, 213–233.
Twain, Marc, The Letters of Mark Twain, 4, 1886–1900. Project Gutenberg, 2006. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3196/3196-h/3196-h.htm.
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (1929). New York: HBJ, 1957.
———, To the Lighthouse (1927). New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1981.
———, “A Sketch of the Past.” In Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1985.
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Abel, E. (2021). Thinking Back Through Our Mothers: The Legacies of Nancy Chodorow. In: Bueskens, P. (eds) Nancy Chodorow and The Reproduction of Mothering. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55590-0_5
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