The Mother / Daughter Plot - Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Paperback)

Mothers and daughters -- the female figures neglected by classicpsychoanalysis and submerged in traditional narrative -- are at the center of thisbook. The novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers from the WesternEuropean and North American traditions reveal that the story of motherhood remainsthe unspeakable plot of Western culture. Focusing on the feminine and, morecontroversially, on the maternal, this book alters our perception of both thefamilial structures basic to traditional narrative -- the Oedipus story -- and thenarrative structures basic to traditional representations of the family -- Freud'sfamily romance. Confronting psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation withnarrative theories, Marianne Hirsch traces the emergence and transformation offemale family romance patterns from Jane Austen to Marguerite Duras.