Conclusion: The Lost Mother

Abstract

This book ends as it began in Chapter 1, with Susan Stewart’s reading of longing, a melancholic dynamic that pulls together the infinitely drawn out elongation of desire with an intrinsic connection with the mother, not least in the “yearning desire[s]” of pregnancy. But, as Stewart stresses, it is the mother as “an imagined location of origin” that is applicable here, not the mother as actual parent¹ Taking these 23 novels as a corpus, I have been surprised by the consistency with which the spectre of the mother manifests herself in fantastic terms. This is an identification suggesting that women’s fantasies remain imprinted by what must always be that “other-space” of the maternal. The point remains, irrespective of whether we cast ourselves in the role of daughter longing for (or fleeing from) the mother, or cloak ourselves in the body of the (good or bad) maternal alter-ego.