Mothers Voicing Mothering?

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: Eaton, Pauline, 1946author.

Title: Mothers voicing mothering? : the representation of motherhood in the novels and short stories of Marie NDiaye / Pauline Eaton.

Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2021] | Series: Studies in contemporary women’s writing, 22354123 ; vol. 10 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020057130 (print) | LCCN 2020057131 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800792227 (paperback) | ISBN 9781800792234 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800792241 (epub) | ISBN 9781800792258 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: NDiaye, MarieCriticism and interpretation. | Mothers in literature. | Mothers and daughters in literature.

Classification: LCC PQ2674.D53 Z63 2021 (print) | LCC PQ2674.D53 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057130

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057131

Cover picture: ‘Effe’ © Eddit Milkovitsch.

Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd.

ISSN 2235-4123

ISBN 978-1-80079-222-7 (print) • ISBN 978-1-80079-223-4 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-80079-224-1 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-80079-225-8 (mobi)

© Peter Lang Group AG 2021

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom

oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com

Pauline Eaton has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the author

Pauline Eaton holds a PhD in Modern French Studies from Birkbeck, University of London, for her work on Marie NDiaye. Combining a career in the UK Civil Service with being a mother to three children, at a time when the status of a mother was little recognised in the workplace, led to her interest in the historical absence from literature of the representation of the maternal experience from the point of view of the mother. The search for the representation of the mother’s voice in literature has been the main focus of her academic research. Recent published articles include ‘Rosie Carpe and the Virgin Mary: Modelling Modern Motherhood?’ in Religion and Gender and ‘Three Strong Grandmothers’ in Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

About the book

Mothers and mothering are significant features of contemporary women’s writing in France and mothers serve as narrators and key protagonists in nearly all Marie NDiaye’s novels and short stories. These mothers rarely strike the reader as attractive personalities and, in their mothering role, they are portrayed as inadequate, abusive or even murderous. A pattern of maternal failure is passed on from mother to daughter and the relationship between mothers and their daughters is one of rejection and suppression.

This book seeks not to redeem NDiaye’s mothers but to explore what this negative representation tells us about mothers and about how mothers represent their own mothering to themselves, especially. Close readings of text and intertext are at the centre of the analytic approach, embracing references to a range of existing commentaries on the author and to the psychoanalytic, mythological, religious and literary background against which her novels in general, and especially her mothers, demand to be read.

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No one who reads the novels of Marie NDiaye can fail to notice their population of extraordinary mothers. Most of her key protagonists are mothers who act in that role and also identify keenly, though rarely happily, as the daughters of their own mothers. Yet they are certainly not role models for joyful and successful mothering. What first prompted me to look closely at NDiaye’s mothers was a certain brief passage in her 2001 novel Rosie Carpe.¹ Rosie is a single mother, astonished to find herself with a baby but apparently coping well, until her breast milk suddenly fails. She attempts to resolve the problem by giving her baby son Titi a bottle, but she meets a furious and unexpected resistance. When she brings the teat of the bottle towards the baby’s lips, he refuses to open his mouth and throws himself backwards with such force that he nearly falls from Rosie’s lap. This particular movement, made by a small baby, but showing such conscious determination and such force that it is shocking, is one I recognized from my own early days as a mother. I can remember warning others holding my first son that such a potentially dangerous movement might occur – it was a particularly acute problem in my parents’ house as the chairs in which people sat with my baby had threateningly hard wooden arms. This tiny detail awoke the memory of a uniquely stressful and difficult time in my life, when I was discovering what being a mother might mean to me. At this point in my initial reading of the novel I identified completely with Rosie. I probably also leapt to the conclusion that NDiaye must have shared my experience and that she wrote as a mother. I wanted to explore what ←1 | 2→I meant by this and what it was about her writing that had produced this sense of personal affinity. Perhaps I hoped that by using my own experience to open up her texts I would be able to disperse some of the mists of prevarication which both idealize and deny the worth of a mother as she mothers. Perhaps I hoped to find an authoritative validation of myself and how I had mothered. This book sets out what I did in fact discover from my reading of NDiaye – a reading which focusses on her mothers and might be seen as a quest to find a representation in literature of the voice of the mother as she mothers, and as she reflects on her experience of mothering. My quest sought the mother as she represents herself to herself, not as she is seen by the eyes of others, nor as she is interpreted through the world view of others.

There is nothing novel about the representation of mothers in art of course. Indeed, there is a long tradition of the representation of mothers in Western visual art and literature. It is, however, fair to say that until quite recently most representations of mothers (and all those which come down to us from the literature of Ancient Greece, a prime source of intertextuality for European writers since the Renaissance) have been composed by men. Men, by definition, have no experience of what it means to be a mother other than from observation, aided perhaps by imagination. They have shaped their representations by their own ideas of what motherhood ought to be like, and the prevailing Western ideology of motherhood is still heavily dependent on a key human (male) construct, Mariology. In addition, political and economic expediency, often aided and abetted by philosophers and researchers, has long dictated how mothers should behave and the degree of devotion they owe their infants. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century elevated an ideal of maternity in which women, as virtuous citizens, were the guardians of social mores and of honour, but this at a time when increased fecundity was required to produce more soldiers for a France under threat. John Bowlby’s concept of infantile attachment to the child’s mother or to a permanent mother substitute helped keep women in the home after the Second World War and return their place in the labour market to men. Scholarly attention to motherhood has inevitably been dominated until relatively recently by male scholars and patriarchal attitudes.←2 | 3→

At the beginning of my relationship with Marie NDiaye, and before I had read Marianne Hirsch’s seminal work on mothers and daughters,² which I discuss later in relation to NDiaye, I was surprised, as Hirsch reports having been, by how unconsciously resistant people were to the idea that there might be something unique about mothers and to the idea that the experience of mothers might matter. When I first began to discuss my thoughts on NDiaye with others it was suggested to me that I should refer to mothering by a more general term, parenting, as there was no real basis for a distinction between the mothering and the fathering of a child. The position that the exclusion of fathers is politically incorrect has become even more of an issue, of course, since the developments in alternative modes of parenting that have been a feature of the twenty-first century. People also asserted to me with confidence that there was no distinction to be made between the role of a biological mother and the role of an adoptive mother, and that people who had not mothered, whether they were men or women, could easily approach and grasp what was involved in being a ←3 | 4→mother through the exercise of the imagination. While not denying the tensions in the issues that informed these various comments, my intention in this book has been precisely to analyse what NDiaye’s protagonists can tell us about the experience of the woman who becomes the biological mother of and caregiver to a child.