http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Vig%C3%A9e-Lebrun
‘Writing Mothers\Daughters: 1780-2012’
Conference Programme
Programme Overview
9.00am – 9.45am
Coffee and Registration
9.45am – 10.50am Special Panel A – Writing Mothers and Daughters
10.50am – 12.20pm Parallel Panels
Panel 1 – Ideals
Panel 2 – Loss
12.20pm – 1.10pm
Lunch
1.10pm – 2.40pm
2.40pm – 4.10pm
Special Panel B – Mothers, Daughters and Trivial Things
Parallel Panels
Panel 3 – Rewriting
Panel 4 – Recovery
4.10pm – 4.30pm
Coffee Break
4.30pm – 6.00pm
Keynote and Closing Remarks
7.30pm
Conference Dinner
Full Programme
Coffee and Registration
9.00am-9.45am - The Atrium
Special Panel A – Writing Mothers and Daughters
9.45am-10.50am
Room: N22
Chairs: Dr Kerry Myler and Dr Julia Banister
Prof. Ruth O. Saxton and Dr Kirsten T. Saxton, Mills College, Oakland CA
‘Narratives of Possibility: Writing Mothers and Daughters’
Parallel Panels
10.50am-12.20pm
Panel 1 – Ideals
Room: N31
Chair: Louise McDonald
These papers, which cover lived experience and fictional representations in a period
marked by the idealization of the feminine domestic sphere, discuss possible disruptions
to mother\daughter relations, disruptions created through publication, political activity
and the foregrounding of pseudo-biological relationships. However, these papers also
raise the problems and limitations of privileging female relationships as a means of
challenging narrow and restrictive ideals of femininity.
Dr Rebecca Davies, NTNU (Trondheim, Norway)
‘An Everlasting Legacy: Ann Martin Taylor’s written dissenting maternity’
Mary F. Gormally, University of the West of England
‘Mother-Daughter Power: The correspondence between Queen Victoria and
Princess Frederick William of Prussia, 1858-1864’
Kathryn M. Harrison, Georgia State University
‘Daughters in Search of Mothers: Exploring Surrogate Motherhood in
Nineteenth-Century British Literature’
Panel 2 – Loss
Room: N5
Chair: Kate Southworth
In these papers, our speakers will consider responses to the loss of a mother. On the one
hand, it seems that the loss of the mother can threaten a breakdown or failure of female
relations and a threat to the stability of female identity; on the other, the loss of the
mother can be said to be necessary for forming a mature female ‘self’. These papers
discuss the significance of the physical presence of the mother, the biological link to a
‘real’ mother, and the difficulty of trying to record the individual experience of a lost
mother\daughter relationship.
Hana Leaper, University of Liverpool
‘Visioning a Maternal/Matriarchal Historiography in the Work of Vanessa Bell
and Virginia Woolf’
Dr Beth Daley, University of Manchester
‘Michele Roberts' Golden Mother’
Dr Rosie Miles, University of Wolverhampton
‘Redivining the Mother-Daughter Relationship: Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret
Life of Bees (2002)’
Lunch
12.20pm-1.10pm - The Sanctuary
Special Panel B – Mothers, Daughters and Trivial Things
1.10pm-2.40pm
Room: N22
Chair: Dr Kirsten Saxton
This special panel, proposed by colleagues at University of Chester, offers an objectorientated approach to discussing the mother\daughter relationship. These papers
explore the significance of apparently inconsequential things (hair, diets, clothing, etc.)
and what they reveal about the relationship between mothers and daughters in the work
of four female writers, ranging from the Victorian to the contemporary: Florence
Marryat, Edith Wharton and Lily and Doris Brett.
Dr Francesca Haig, Department of English, University of Chester
‘Diets, haircuts and deathcamps: the contested mother of Lily and Doris
Brett’
Dr Sarah Heaton, Department of English, University of Chester
‘My Clothes, My Jewels, My Figure: Edith Wharton’s mothers and daughters
‘just looking’ in mirrors’
Dr Georgina O’Brien Hill, Department of English, University of Chester
‘My Spirit Child: Florence Marryat and Her Daughters’
Parallel Panels
2.40pm-4.10pm
Panel 3 - Rewriting
Room: N31
Chair: Dr Francesca Haig
The speakers in this panel share a core interest in literary texts as spaces for weighing the
burden of maternal influence on young women. In each of these papers the mother as a
negative physical presence is discussed through examining texts which confront the
function of this negative model and attempt, in various ways (and with varying success),
to rewrite that narrative.
Dr Rano Ringo, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar
‘A Study in Contrast: Mother-daughter relationship in Margaret Laurence’s A
Jest of God and The Fire Dwellers’
Rebecca Crowley, Leeds Metropolitan University
‘“Mother Blaming” in Contemporary Fiction Marketed at Young Women’
Dr Kerry Myler, Newman University College
‘Mother-Daughter Relationships in Women’s Contemporary Coming-of-Age
Novels’
Panel 4 - Recovery
Room: N5
Chair: Dr Julia Banister
This panel considers the significance of the past, personal and political, in the formation
of new mother\daughter relationships. Writing which focuses on (literary) grandmothersmothers-daughters can offer an alternative to both a past and present dominated by
male narratives, but it also suggests that the mother\daughter relationship is inextricably
bound to the past—looking back, rather than forward. These papers explore these issues
with a particular focus on mother\daughter relationships which are shaped by the
demands of negotiating or securing national identities.
Paola Quazzo, University of Turin, Italy
‘Tongues and Hands of Mothers in South African Women Writing’
Rebecca Gill, Newcastle University
‘Postcolonial Maternal Legacies: Reading Janet Campbell Hale’s Bloodlines:
Odyssey of a Native Daughter as Intergenerational Autobiography’
Olga Michael, University of Manchester
‘Constructing the Mother-Daughter Bond in Lynda Barry’s Graphic Memoirs
One Hundred Demons and What It Is’
Coffee Break
4.10pm-4.30pm - The Atrium
Keynote and Closing Remarks
4.30pm-6.00pm
Keynote
Room: N22
Chairs: Dr Kerry Myler and Dr Julia Banister
In this paper Dr Andermahr returns to Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only
Fruit (1985) to reconsider the representation of mother\daughter relations in light of
Winterson’s recently published memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
(2011). In doing so she examines Winterson’s use of the ‘cover story’ (a story which
covers over another unspeakable one) and discusses how the new memoir ‘uncovers’ the
trauma and loss in Winterson’s seminal mother\daughter narrative, Oranges.
Dr Sonya Andermahr, University of Northampton
‘Jeanette Winterson Writing Mothers and Daughters: From Oranges Are Not
the Only Fruit to Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?'
Abstracts
Special Panel A
Narratives of Possibility: Writing Mothers and Daughters
Prof. Ruth O. Saxton and Dr Kirsten T. Saxton, Department of English, Mills College,
Oakland CA
With its focus on literary and historical configurations of writing mothers and
daughters from the eighteenth century through the present, this conference
provides an extraordinary opportunity for professors Ruth O. Saxton and Kirsten T.
Saxton to co-author and present a paper in which we discuss our literary scholarship
(Kirsten Saxton’s work on the literature of the eighteenth century and Ruth Saxton’s
work on that of the twentieth and twenty first -centuries) as well as our lived
narratives as mother and daughter scholars. Both successful critics and teachers and
excellent readers of one another’s work, both daughters and both mothers, we have
never written together nor talked publically about our own relationship as “writing
mother and daughter.”
Ruth’s scholarly work--on Doris Lessing and Virginia Woolf, as well as her
edited collection The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by
Women (Palgrave 1999) and forthcoming collection on narratives of aging women in
contemporary fiction by women--explicitly engages with fictional representations of
mothers and of daughters. Kirsten’s work--on early eighteenth-century women
writers and her recent book, Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 16801760 (Ashgate 2009)--engages with narratives of female possibility, including those
of motherhood and daughterhood, but in less explicit ways, a tendency we find
telling regarding contemporary narratives of literary feminist inheritance and
possibility.
While the paper and its expanded essay form will have some
autobiographical information, the piece is primarily a theoretical and material
argument regarding the shifts in literary and cultural imaginaries that have occurred
in our discipline (that of English literary study) and how our own personal
trajectories speak to the “narratives of possibility” of scholarly inquiry and lived
critical discourse.
Panel 1: Ideals
An Everlasting Legacy: Ann Martin Taylor’s written dissenting maternity
Dr Rebecca Davies, NTNU (Trondheim, Norway)
Ann Martin Taylor’s name is only really known today, if at all, in connection with her
role as a mother. She was the matriarch of the religiously dissenting Taylor family,
which constituted a productive familial publishing enterprise and included the
famous children’s authors Ann and Jane Taylor. Having originally resisted any active
participation in the production of domestic literature, viewing it as “unwomanly”,
Mrs. Taylor was persuaded later in life to publish her writing. Eventually she
produced eight educational titles, all of which contained heavily religious maternal
advice and were published in Britain between 1814 and 1825 by the religious
publishers Taylor and Hessey.
This paper will examine Taylor’s conscious acknowledgement of the
materiality of the physical book in relation to the earliest of these works Maternal
Solicitude (probably written between 1795-1811, and eventually published in 1814.)
Ostensibly, Taylor wrote in order to offer private advice to one juvenile reader - her
daughter - as she was unwell at the time of writing and wanted to provide for her
daughter’s education in case of her death. Taylor focuses on the manner in which
the physical book should be read and preserved by her daughter. The reading of the
book is offered as an imperfect alternative to maternal education, intended to
replace the physical mother’s external guidance by assisting the development of an
internal conscience. I also explore how the eventual publication of this work changed
the nature of the advice it contained. Taylor’s conscious acknowledgment of a public
readership for her writing, and her deliberate employment of the genre of maternal
advice texts, allowed her to participate in the empowering discourse of maternal
education. In turn, this position of ethical authority allowed her to engage with the
concept of a chain of maternal influence from mother’s to daughters, which in turn
influenced society (or as Taylor termed it, the ‘Common weal’), while apparently
remaining within the domestic sphere of maternal education of daughters and
feminine private reading practice.
Mother-Daughter Power: The correspondence between Queen Victoria and Princess
Frederick William of Prussia, 1858-1864
Mary F. Gormally, University of the West of England
Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter the Princess Royal were the two most
powerful women of their time, in Europe. This paper addresses the abiding problem
of narrating their Mother-Daughter relationship. Since the nineteenth century,
scholarship has diminished their complexity – and their power, Royal, political and
maternal. Queen Victoria was the monarch of Britain and its empire, and mother of
nine children. The Princess Royal was married to the heir to the Prussian throne, and
mother of eight children.
I will focus on the most telling moment in their 43-year correspondence, the
period between 1858 and 1864. At this point in the nineteenth century, women
were placed firmly within the domestic sphere. Narratives of this Mother-Daughter
relationship are similarly framed. Cannadine inscribed Queen Victoria as “the
devoted wife”, who “had little time, energy or inclination left for politics.” These are
narratives other to political power; the relationship is contained within the familial
and the domestic.
What else is on offer? How can we read this correspondence in ways that do
not diminish the complexities of these two powerful women? Second-Wave Feminist
critics, such as M. Hirsch, L. Irigary, and K. Silverman may offer us more expansive
narratives, which place the Mother-Daughter relationship at the centre of the
physical and psychic plot. The Queen Victoria-Princess Royal letters are marked by a
continual movement between autonomy and dependency, agency and passivity, the
political and the maternal. This is a relationship marked by shared joys, loss,
competition, anxieties – one that is complex, public, personal and political.
Daughters in Search of Mothers: Exploring Surrogate Motherhood in NineteenthCentury British Literature
Kathryn M. Harrison, Georgia State University
Surrogate motherhood abounds in Nineteenth-Century British fiction, in which
young women whose mothers are either dead or absent fill the voids in their lives
with surrogate mothers. Victorian novels generally open, as Carolyn Dever
describes, with “ a scene of family rupture, frequently a maternal deathbed or a tale
of a wanton maternal abandonment. The scenario is familiar: the narrative will
pursue the story of a child or adolescent protagonist who, motherless, is left to
decode the mysteries of the world . . . .” (1). While being motherless allows young
heroines to develop their own senses of self, “decoding the mysteries of the world”
requires access to women with more life experience than the innocent young
heroines, leading many heroines to seek female figures to help guide them as they
go through their comings-of-age. The guidance heroines find, however, is not always
as loving and constructive as the guidance they seek, and many girls learn to
maneuver being female within patriarchal nineteenth-century England by watching
their own surrogate mothers and learning what not to do. In turn, many heroines
become surrogate mothers as they ripen into adulthood. This paper seeks to explore
how the relationship between surrogate mother and daughter leads heroines into
maternal relationships with other young girls, not suggesting that heroines continue
this trend to pay homage to their own surrogate mothers, but rather to provide
newer, better examples for the future women of England.
Works Cited
Dever, Carolyn. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and
the Anxiety of Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.
Panel 2: Loss
Visioning a Maternal/Matriarchal Historiography in the Work of Vanessa Bell and
Virginia Woolf
Hana Leaper, University of Liverpool
“If one could give a sense of my mother’s personality one would have to be an artist.
It would be as difficult to do that ...as to paint a Cezanne”
Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past
“Why didn’t some of her innumerable descendants scribble something, silly and
illiterate perhaps as this, but first-hand and real? My wish to know more of her
drives me on”
Vanessa Bell, Memoir Relating to Mrs Jackson
The relationship of visual artist Vanessa Bell and writer Virginia Woolf to their
mother's image profoundly influenced their art. Julia Duckworth Stephen, nee Pattle
was photographed and painted by many renowned Victorian visual artists. Her image
came to represent the Victorian middle class ideal of femininity - the Angel in the
House. Woolf claimed that in order to pursue her career she first had to slay the
angel, but also that she was haunted by her mother until depicting her as Mrs
Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Images of Julia reappear throughout Bell's work.
As daughters of Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of The Dictionary of National
Biography they were both acutely aware of the 'lopsidedness’ of history and set
about the task of exploring more suitable representational techniques - methods
which would capture both the 'granite' of accurate fact, and the 'rainbow' of
personality. They called for and developed a maternal historiography which differed
significantly from standard biographical representations using fiction, theatre,
memoirs, photography and visual art.
This paper will explore Bell and Woolf's attempts to creatively record the
histories of their female ancestors including Woolf's play Freshwater: a comedy in
which Bell performed the role of Julia Margaret Cameron, and Bell's attempts at
representing their mother visually.
Michele Roberts' Golden Mother
Dr Beth Daley, University of Manchester
This paper examines the devices Michele Roberts uses to achieve the maternal
reparation sought throughout her oeuvre in her 2008 work, The Secret Staircase.
Catholic female iconography, psychoanalysis and feminist politics all have an impact
on female relationships in the work of Michèle Roberts. Roberts portrays both sistersister and mother-daughter relationships as key to her protagonist’s journey into
mature femininity.
The text The Secret Staircase, one of Roberts' latest works, explores the
ending of her portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship, which she has set up in
previous works, for example, 1978's A Piece of the Night and 1994's Flesh and Blood.
In it, the protagonist makes reparation with her dying mother, with whom she has
had a difficult relationship and whose religious and political ideologies have caused
conflict in their relationship.
In A Piece of the Night, the process of maternal reparation was vague, and in
Flesh and Blood, it was conscious but utopian, depicting the actual reunion of
mother and baby’s bodies. In The Secret Staircase, Roberts depicts a real-life process,
not one that can only be carried out in the imaginary. The ability to deal with the
psychoanalytical depressive anxieties of guilt and grief without undue trauma marks
the completion of the depressive position. By the end of the work, the mother and
daughter exist together in a kind of harmony that has not been possible throughout
their lives, a result that can only occur with psychological reparation and acceptance
of the past.
Redivining the Mother-Daughter Relationship: Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of
Bees (2002)
Dr Rosie Miles, University of Wolverhampton
Sue Monk Kidd’s bestselling American novel, The Secret Life of Bees, is profoundly
and integrally concerned with re-imagining the relationship between mothers and
daughters. The novel opens with the primal loss of the young heroine’s mother and
in the course of the novel Lily Owens must come to terms with the reality of her
mother’s leaving and death. Hanging over the novel’s plot is also the question of
whether it is Lily herself who has caused her mother’s death.
Monk Kidd is also a writer of spiritual memoir and she has charted her own
move out of what she regards as the patriarchy of Christianity into an exploration of
the divine feminine. Implicit in her undertaking this spiritual journey is the need to
find new myths and stories of significance which mothers can offer their daughters
(The Dance of the Dissident Daughter [1996], Monk Kidd’s account of her journey out
of Christianity, opens with her horror at how some local men treat her teenage
daughter).
The Secret Life of Bees is Monk Kidd’s attempt, in fictional form, to create and
envisage some of these new stories that can redivine the mother-daughter
relationship. Lily Owens is nurtured by a number of surrogate mothers and is given a
powerful spiritual sense of self via the figure of the Black Madonna, who features as
a symbol of liberation both for the community of black women in the novel, but also
for Lily too.
French feminist theorists such as Kristeva and Irigaray have also written on
the mother-daughter relationship and reimagining the divine and they can fruitfully
be brought into dialogue with Monk Kidd’s project. Adrienne Rich wrote that ‘the
loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential
female tragedy’ (Of Woman Born). Monk Kidd is one of the most prominent (and
popular) contemporary writers aiming not to negate or deny this loss, but to reenvisage and redivine the mother-daughter narratives that are possible from out the
other side.
Special Panel B
Diets, haircuts and deathcamps: the contested mother of Lily and Doris Brett
Dr Francesca Haig, Department of English, University of Chester
Australian authors Lily and Doris Brett depict their late mother in wildly different
ways. In Lily Brett’s writings, their mother (or a thinly-veiled fictional version of her)
is depicted as damaged, needy and emotionally abusive. In the memoir of Doris
Brett, their mother is gentle, loving and universally adored.
This paper examines Doris Brett’s Eating the Underworld and Lily Brett’s In
Full View, Too Many Men and The Auschwitz Poems to show how the sisters’ feud
over the representation of their mother brings into the public arena disputes usually
seen as explicitly domestic: not only the issue of mothering itself, but also its ‘petty’
manifestation in areas such as diet and hairstyle. Beneath these apparently
inconsequential conflicts lies the core complication at the heart of the Brett sister’s
relationship with their mother: the fact that she is a Holocaust survivor. Thus, to Lily
the short haircut overseen by their mother is punitive, an ‘unconscious need for me
to experience something of what she had experienced’ at Auschwitz; to Doris, it is
simply ‘the practical short haircut that many of my friends sported.’ Their mother’s
attempts to make Lily lose weight are depicted by Lily as irresponsible, if not abusive;
Doris counters that ‘any responsible parent would be concerned. Lily’s doctors were
also concerned.’
This paper explores what the Brett sisters’ feud over their mother’s memory
can reveal about responsibility and credibility in life-writing, and about the
ambivalent role of the ‘second-generation’ Holocaust writer.
My Clothes, My Jewels, My Figure: Edith Wharton’s mothers and daughters ‘just
looking’ in mirrors.
Dr Sarah Heaton, Department of English, University of Chester
‘Nobody wears their clothes as you do.’ The Mother’s Recompense.
The paper will examine the complex relationship between mothers and daughters,
and age and beauty through the exchange of clothes, jewellery and the figure in
Edith Wharton’s writing. Whilst the paper will focus on The Mother’s Recompense
initially it will be argued that in novels such as The Custom of the Country, The House
of Mirth and The Buccaneers Wharton’s daughters epitomise resplendent youth as
opposed to the drab mother figures left stored and redundant in the domestic
sphere. Yet in The Mother’s Recompense the mother’s perspective is taken on in a
far more involved exchange between mother and daughter. The desire for youth and
beauty and the anxieties of dressing as a middle-aged mother are problematized by
the changing fashions and changing body shape and the psychological drama of
sensual desire is played out in the symbolism of the wedding dress for both daughter
and mother.
The paper will explore the extent to which mothers and daughters have a
level of sensual engagement with their clothes rather than the perpetual ‘just
looking’ in order to elicit an understanding of the fluctuating power relationships
between mothers and daughters as expressed in their clothes, their jewellery and
their figures.
My Spirit Child: Florence Marryat and Her Daughters
Dr Georgina O’Brien Hill, Department of English, University of Chester
This paper explores the mother/daughter relationship beyond the grave through the
spiritualist memoirs of the popular Victorian novelist Florence Marryat. Having lost a
ten-day old baby, also Florence, and an adult daughter, Eva, Marryat claimed that
she maintained a relationship with both daughters through the physical
materialisation of their spirits conjured by a medium in the séance room. Her
memoirs There is no Death (1891) and The Spirit World (1894) reveal that
manipulation of the ‘host’ female body and the arrangement of seemingly
insignificant articles such as clothing, hair and jewellery all became the focus of
intense scrutiny during the séance, for they helped to prove that the medium and
the spirit she materialised were two separate but connected entities. Furthermore,
moments of intimacy between mother and ‘daughters’ were also located around the
‘trivial’, including gifts of jewellery from the spirit world and opportunities for
Marryat to touch and arrange her daughters’ hair and clothing.
This paper considers how apparently ‘petty’ details about jewellery, clothing
and the body became an essential part of the séance experience and examines what
this suggests about the bond Marryat refused to relinquish.
Panel 3 - Rewriting
A Study in Contrast: Mother-daughter relationship in Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of
God and The Fire Dwellers
Dr Rano Ringo, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar
The paper analyzes the depiction of mother- daughter relationship in Margaret
Laurence’s A Jest of God and The Fire Dwellers. It portrays the contrast between a
stifling mother-daughter relationship and a healthy, fruitful one. The protagonist of
A Jest of God is Rachel Cameron, a thirty-four year old unmarried woman, who has
spent most of her life caring for her mother, May Cameron, and living by her rules.
At the beginning of the novel, she is completely dominated by the voice of her
manipulating mother. The staid Manawakan society in which Rachel lives has fixed
notions about how a woman is supposed to behave. Living with her mother, Rachel
has ample opportunity to be reminded of the voices of patriarchy. Rachel is weighed
down by what she considers the natural and right code of conduct and we witness
her mother’s role in her gender socialization. Rachel only remembers her mother’s
preaching voice which makes her feel guilty whenever she fails to act acceptably. In
the other novel of Margaret Laurence, The Fire Dwellers, the mother-daughter
relationship is a positive, vibrant one and shows that until a strong line of love,
confirmation and example stretches from mother to daughter, from woman to
woman across the generations, women will still be wandering in wilderness. Thirty
nine year old Stacey’s relationship with her fourteen year old daughter Katie is
mediated by desires other than competition for the phallus, desires such as their
mutual love of dancing that have no reference to the phallus. Through her
recognition of their mutual love of dancing Stacey acknowledges a complex
relationship with Katie that encompasses love and sorrow, continuity and
discontinuity, identity and difference, without using the idiom of conflict.
‘Mother Blaming’ in Contemporary Fiction Marketed at Young Women
Rebecca Crowley, Leeds Metropolitan University
This paper considers representations of mothers and daughters in young adult
fiction about anorexia. It specifically focuses on the work of two contemporary
American women writers: Aimee Liu and Marya Hornbacher in relation to their
respective texts Solitaire (1979) and Wasted (1998). It argues that in both these texts
a rewriting of a stereotypical figure associated with discussions of anorexia in prose
fiction is at play: the rewriting of the stereotype of the phallic mother who castrates
her daughter’s development to the point of causing anorexia. The paper considers
how Liu and Hornbacher deconstruct this phallic mother stereotype in order to draw
attention to contextual factors that are disguised by the presence of this figure. Once
the figure of the overbearing mother is deconstructed it becomes clear that a
complexity of repressive gender structures also contextualise the anorexic subject.
The paper considers the different ways in which Liu and Hornbacher puncture this
stereotype in order to draw attention to how competing narrative representations of
the term ‘woman’ are at play within the genre of young adult fiction about anorexia.
The objective of the paper is to implicitly consider the question of how a
poststructuralist feminist debate over the term ‘woman’ is being represented as a
site of narrative conflict within fiction marketed at a new generation of young
women.
‘My mother, my matter. My mother, myself. My mother, my monstrousness’:
Mother-Daughter relationships in the female ‘Coming-of-Age’ Novel
Kerry Myler, Newman University College
Mother\daughter relationships have most often been characterised by conflict and
separation. In second-wave feminist fiction, girls often only ‘come of age’ once they
have rejected their mothers along with the generational and ideological values for
which they stand, particularly marriage and motherhood. In contrast, motherdaughter relationships in 21st century popular culture are often represented in terms
of reciprocal bonds of love and caring where mother and daughter are ‘bffs’. I
propose that contemporary women’s ‘coming-of-age’ novels negotiate between
these two opposing poles: they maintain strong thematic links to that second-wave
tradition of conflict/separation but they also address the pleasures of being one’s
‘mother’s daughter’ and sharing a special, and specifically female and bodily, bond.
In 21st century ‘coming-of-age’ novels, such as Eva Hoffman’s The Secret
(2001) and Janet Fitch’s White Oleander (1999), the heroine’s sense of self is
intimately bound up with her mother’s body; the emotional and bodily bonds
between mother and daughter are highly valued, even venerated. However, it seems
that these ‘post-feminist’ texts are unable to satisfactorily move beyond the secondwave ‘conflict/separation’ plot and sustain the daughter’s sense of positive
identification with the mother; instead they revert back to prioritising the malefemale relationship in which female identity relies upon recognition by the male
gaze. In trying to redress the issue of mother-daughter estrangement in secondwave ‘coming-of-age’ literature these texts ultimately resort to reaffirming the
traditional heterosexual romance plot. Not only do these novels emphasise the
difficulty of redressing the perceived faults of second-wave feminist literature but
they also register a sense of futility in the feminist quest for an embodied
subjectivity that can escape traditional gendered narratives.
Panel 4: Recovery
Tongues and Hands of Mothers in South African Women Writing
Paola Quazzo, University of Turin, Italy
In a country still in transition as South Africa is, the artists strive to find a voice that is
not only representative of their present but also reminiscent of their past. In the last
decades South African women writers, both poets and novelists, have investigated
motherhood and daughterhood as artistic and political paradigms in order to help
their search for identity as women and writers. Authors such as Sindiwe Magona
have started from a maternal point of view to portray the condition of frustration
and violence in which a large part of black South African society, and women in
particular, lived at the very beginning of democracy in 1994. The same strategy has
been adopted by poets such as Ingrid Jonker, in whose poetry motherhood becomes
a meta-condition, since the individual negated maternity metaphorically mirrors the
negation of future and freedom in the nation. The “woman-nation topic”, as Elleke
Boehmer calls it, has been re-phrased by their literary daughters. Their relationship
with mothers has taken place in the form of either confrontation or, more often,
benign exploitation. In their search for an identity through language, women writers
adopt appropriation and re-writing as tools to incorporate the white as well as black,
the colonial as well as slave literary tradition. Poets such as Makhosazana Xaba look
for mothers who can help them build a language to suit their individuality, but also
for exempla: fore-mothers eclipsed by the male historical, political and cultural
discourse are evoked to be the protagonists of a praise epic poem for which the
contemporary female voice still feels inadequate.
Postcolonial Maternal Legacies: Reading Janet Campbell Hale’s Bloodlines: Odyssey
of a Native Daughter as Intergenerational Autobiography
Rebecca Gill, Newcastle University
This paper explores how mixed-race Native American author Janet Campbell Hale
incorporates stories from the lives of her mother and grandmothers within her
collection of autobiographical essays. Hale’s work makes clear that maternal
legacies can be negative and damaging as well as nurturing and potentially healing,
and a key feature of Bloodlines is her attempt to understand and reconcile herself to
the physical, verbal and psychological abuse she experienced at the hands of her
mother Margaret. Drawing on theories of inherited memory and trauma, I analyse
Hale’s use of maternal life stories that predate her own birth to represent the legacy
of colonial violence and discrimination experienced by her Native American
ancestors. By recreating her maternal grandmother’s story from a combination of
personal experience, Margaret’s oral narratives, and archival research to fill the gaps
left by her foremothers’ traumatised silences, Hale uncovers a legacy of racial selfhatred that is passed from mother to daughter through the generations. In contrast,
the story of Hale’s paternal grandmother is told in more positive terms, using the
trope of blood memory first developed by Native American author N Scott
Momaday. Hale draws on oral storytelling and an empathetic sense of shared
physical experience to re-establish her place in the generational lineage. Using
blood memory to tell an alternative maternal story offers Hale the potential to
reconnect with her cultural heritage through a strengthened Native American
identity, and to heal the damage caused by generations of colonial trauma.
Constructing the Mother-Daughter Bond in Lynda Barry’s Graphic Memoirs One
Hundred Demons and What It Is
Olga Michael, University of Manchester
Lynda Barry is an American cartoonist, whose graphic memoirs One Hundred
Demons and What It Is were published in 2002 and 2009 respectively. These lifenarratives reconstruct fragmented traumatic episodes from the protagonist’s
childhood, while exploring how art can negotiate traumatic memory. In one of the
rare academic articles on One Hundred Demons, Melinda de Jesus discusses the
protagonist’s Filipino heritage passed on by her grandmother, while observing that
her mother rarely talks about her Filipino background. Additionally, she points to the
alienation of the mother from her daughter, which is reflected in Barry’s first book
through the use of the Aswang; a female monster created within Filipino myth and
related to the protagonist by her grandmother. This paper will discuss how the
Aswang and the Medusa are used in One Hundred Demons and What It Is
respectively, to bring forth this problematic relationship, functioning as a coping
mechanism for Lynda. Moreover, it will explore how female monstrosity is used in
both graphic memoirs to construct mother and daughter as mirror images of one
another. The female monsters will be shown to demonstrate continuity between
mother and daughter, both of whom are embodied within the two creatures. Lastly,
the paper will argue for a feminist revisiting and re-appropriation of female
monstrosity, which through the combination of visual and textual elements,
facilitates and brings forth a complex representation of the mother/daughter
relationship.
Keynote Address: Jeanette Winterson Writing Mothers and Daughters: From
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit to Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Dr Sonya Andermahr, Reader in English, University of Northampton
‘And I suppose that the saddest thing for me thinking about the cover version that is
Oranges, is I write a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not
survive it.’ (Winterson 2011, 6)
The narrative of angry daughters and sad, absent, or monstrous mothers is one of
the dominant paradigms in women’s writing. To some extent, Jeanette Winterson’s
early work seemed to challenge this construction: while Mrs Winterson and Dog
Woman are certainly monstrous figures, they are also powerfully compelling, and
worthy of sympathy if not wholly admirable. Her novels prompted a generation of
feminist readers to delight in the strong maternal figures and the model of female
community they so vividly depicted. Here was a writing daughter who had the skills
to find humour in and celebrate the complex mother-daughter bond. Now the
publication of Winterson’s memoir reveals that it was all so much worse than the
fiction; that the delightful humour of Oranges was a marvellous, invented story to
cover over and defend against Jeanette’s trauma and multiple losses. In this paper I
want to go back to this origin story, to consider the representation of motherdaughter relations in Winterson’s debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,
published in 1985, in the light of her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be
Normal, published in 2011. A gap of 26 years separates the two texts, but they
fundamentally treat the same theme: how the fact of Winterson’s adoption shaped
her identity and subsequent life. What the memoir does that the novel can’t do,
because she didn’t know it then, is tell the story of the Winterson’s discovery of the
identity of her birth mother and the ‘real’ story of her adoption. But what it also
does is throw another light on what Winterson was trying to achieve in Oranges; she
was creating not merely a fictional autobiography of working class life, or a lesbian
Bildungsroman, or a postmodern metafiction, but constructing what she has called a
‘cover story’: a story which covers over another unspeakable one. In light of the
memoir, that other story is brought to the surface and it is, as Winterson poignantly
makes evident in her memoir, one that was simply too painful to tell.
Biographical Sketches
Dr Sonya Andermahr is a Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of
Northampton. Her research interests are in contemporary women's writing,
especially Anglo-American literature, modern British fiction, and feminist theory and
pedagogy. She is currently working on a study of narratives of maternal loss, looking
at the representation of grief in contemporary women's fiction. Her publications
include: Jeanette Winterson, Modern British Fiction Series (2009), Jeanette
Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide (2007), A Glossary of Feminist Theory, coauthored with Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz (2000 [1997]), A Concise Glossary of
Feminist Theory (1997) and Straight Studies Modified: Lesbian Interventions in the
Academy (1997), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.
Prof. Ruth O. Saxton is Professor of English at Mills College, Oakland CA. She is
author of Teaching Mrs Dalloway (2009), The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in
Contemporary Fiction by Women (1999), and Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold
(1994), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.
Dr Kirsten T. Saxton is Associate Professor in English at Mills College, Oakland CA. She
is author of Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680-1760: Deadly Plots.
(2009) and The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work
(2000) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.
Dr Rebecca Davies finished her PhD, on maternal educational writing in the long
eighteenth century, at Aberystwyth University in January 2011, where she also
worked as a lecturer for two and a half years. She is now based at NTNU, Trondheim,
Norway. Rebecca is currently working on turning her thesis into a book; "Written
Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education: Educating by the Book" is
due to come out with Ashgate next year.
Mary F. Gormally is an Art Historian, a Cultural Historian, a Feminist, and, for the
past 25 years, a part time lecturer at the University of the West of England, at the
University of Bristol, at the Open University, and at Cardiff University. In the late
80’s and early 90’s she worked with Professor Griselda Pollock on mid 19th century
Royal British iconography. Her ongoing research interests include notions of
Femininity and the Mother-Daughter relationship in twentieth century and
contemporary women’s art and writing, for example, in the work of Marion Milner,
Francesca Sanvitale and Annette Messenger. She has given papers on the MotherDaughter relationship in Leeds, Bristol and the first National Women’s History
conference in Nottingham.
Kathryn Harrison is a Ph.D candidate in Literary Studies at Georgia State University in
Atlanta, Georgia, USA, where she has taught English Composition and Business
Writing. She also works as a consultant for Business Communications classes at the
Goizueta Business School at Emory University. Her MA thesis, titled Three Daughters
in Search of Mothers: Exploring Surrogate Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century British
Literature, examined motherlessness and surrogate motherhood in the Romantic
and Victorian bildungsroman. She has presented papers on female writers such as
Jane Austen and George Eliot at conferences for organizations such as the South
Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Northeastern Modern
Language Association, among others.
Hana Leaper obtained her BA in English Literature and the History of Art and MA in
Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She is currently studying for a PhD in the
English Literature department at the University of Liverpool. Broadly speaking, her
research areas are British Modern art and literature, specifically focusing upon the
post-impressionist aesthetics of Vanessa Bell and her associates in the Bloomsbury
Group.
Dr Beth Daley has just completed her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of
Manchester which comprised of a fiction novel entitled 'Blood and Water', and a
critical thesis entitled 'THE GOLDEN MOTHER: The influence of Catholic female
iconography, psychoanalysis and feminist politics on female relationships in selected
works of Michèle Roberts.' She has recently launched a series of creative writing
workshops and is doing freelance work in copywriting and marketing. She also has a
small home-run cupcake business
Dr Rosie Miles is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton,
where she runs a module on Women’s Writing and Feminist Literary Theories. The
Secret Life of Bees features on the course, as the set text on a session on ‘Mothers
and Daughters’. She is fascinated by the links between Monk Kidd’s spiritual writings
and the profound influence and success of her first novel and has serious ambitions
to get on a plane and go to the States to interview Monk Kidd for a journal such as
Contemporary Women’s Writing. She is also the co-editor (with Pippa Bennett) of
William Morris in the Twenty-First Century (2010) and is just finishing off Victorian
Poetry in Context for Continuum.
Dr Francesca Haig is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chester.
She earned her PhD from the University of Melbourne, and has published articles on
topics ranging from pseudoscience to Shakespeare. Her principal research interest is
Holocaust fiction. Her poetry appears in various national and international journals;
her first collection of poetry, Bodies of Water (Five Islands Press) was published in
2006.
Dr Sarah Heaton is Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of English at the University of
Chester. She gained her PhD at Keele University on architecture and space in Don
DeLillo’s novels. Her main research focus is architecture, the rise of the department
store and fashion in literature. She has regularly given papers on fashion in literature
ranging from ‘Le Rue de La Paix or the Ladies Mile: Transatlantic Exchange of Dress in
the Fiction of Edith Wharton’ to looking at men’s accessories in Henry James and F.
Scott Fitzgerald. She is currently working on her monograph Fashioning the
Transatlantic and has a chapter ‘Consuming clothes and dressing desire in the
Twilight series’ coming out in The Human Vampire (Palgrave, 2012).
Dr Georgina O’Brien Hill is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester. Her PhD
examined George Eliot, Charlotte Yonge, Florence Marryat and the periodical press.
She has published on the work of Marryat and Charles Reade and has co-edited (with
Dr Valerie Fehlbaum) a special issue of Women’s Writing journal on the work of Ella
Hepworth Dixon. She has an article forthcoming on Charlotte Yonge’s editorial work
and is currently writing a book on the work of the woman editor at mid-century.
Dr. Rano Ringo has been working as Assistant Professor of English at the Department
of Humanities, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, India since June 2010. She
received her PhD in English Literature from the Indian Institute of Technology,
Roorkee, India. The topic of her research was “Anticipating Postfeminism: A Study of
the Novels of Margaret Laurence.” Her areas of interest include Gender Studies,
Postcolonial Studies and Modern Fiction.
Rebecca Crowley is a second year PhD student at Leeds Metropolitan University. She
is writing a thesis entitled ‘Representations of Women and Madness in Post-Asylum
Fiction’.
Dr Kerry Myler is an early career academic in the field of contemporary women’s
writing. Her doctoral thesis examined Doris Lessing’s engagement with R. D. Laing’s
anti-psychiatry movement. Her research interests include: 20th and 21st century
literature, gender and sexuality studies, the body, embodiment and identity, and
representations of mother-daughter relationships.
Paola Quazzo graduated from the University of Turin in 2003, where she is currently
attending a Ph.D programme in Postcolonial Literature. She holds a Master's Degree
in Postcolonial Translation from the University of Pisa. She is presently working on
the influence of Italian writers on postcolonial anglophone writers. She translated
into Italian and published some poems by S.Bhatt and M.Xaba. She studied teaching
methodology for foreign languages and teaches high school students.
Rebecca Gill is currently writing up her PhD in English Literature at Newcastle
University. Her research interests include women’s autobiography, postcolonial
literature and trauma theory, and my thesis is entitled ‘Intergenerational
Autobiography, Historical Narrative and Trauma: Maternal Life Stories in Postcolonial
Women’s Writing’. She has taught Introduction to Literary Studies at Newcastle
University for three years, and has also taught Women’s Autobiography at University
of Sunderland for a semester. She studied for her BA in American Literature at
University of East Anglia, and holds an MA in Contemporary Literary Studies from
Lancaster University.
Olga Michael completed her undergraduate studies in English Language and
Literature at the University of Cyprus (2004-2008). She continued with an MA in
American Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester (2008-2009) and is
currently a third year PhD student in English and American Studies at the same
university.
We would like to thank all our presenting and non-presenting delegates
for their involvement in today’s conference.