在目前愈來愈受重視的文化認同議題上，譚恩美在《喜福會》中充分地展現了華裔美國人在美國環境中的認同困境。面對自己的雙重文化背景，華裔美國人往往採取抗拒的態度，這常使得中國認同成為她們的包袱，誤以為只有拋棄中國認同才能使她們在美國被認同與接受。本論文提供了三個主題，分別從華裔美人的自我認同、語言和時空變化中打破華裔美國人普遍的迷思，亦即隱藏甚至打壓自己的中國認同才能使自己的認同不致混亂而獲得平衡。這三項主題同時也顯示在文中的華裔美人的內心成長，從抗拒到認同，她們終對自我肯定並創造出獨立的華裔美國人的歷史。 Introduction Chapter One: Disintegration of a Unitary Chinese or American Self: Emergence of New Female Selfhood Chapter Two: Decentering the Languages Chapter Three: Breaking the Boundaries of Time and Space Conclusion / Amy Tan has created The Joy Luck Club a book with Chinese Americans' struggles and inner conflicts in American context. In this book, Tan manages four pairs of Chinese American mothers and daughters to demonstrate their conflicts in both generation gaps and cultural identities. In the searching of cultural identities, we see resistance, negotiation and ultimately the communication between the mothers and the daughters. This book successfully portraits the becoming process of the in-between cultural identities of the Chinese Americans. This thesis is divided into five parts: Introduction, three chapters, and Conclusion. Three chapters discuss the development of the characters via the themes of self-construction, language application, and the arrangement of time and space not only to abolish monolithic American cultural identity but also to motivate an equal valuation for Chinese identity. By exploring these themes in the life of the Chinese Americans in The Joy Luck Club, I would like to inspire a border perspective for Chinese Americans to reach their cultural identities.

Female characters in novels by Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster are studied in their relationships as wives, mothers, daughters and prospective brides. The novels selected are those where the writers are concerned with families dominated by Victorian ideals. Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Bay (1919), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927). E.M. Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907) , A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910).The socioeconomic, religious and ideological origins of the Victorian ideals are traced, esp. as they are related to the writers' family background in the tradition of English intellectual life. The central theme of the four novels by Woolf is the mother-daughter relationship which is analyzed in its components of love and resentment, often revealed in an interior monoloque. Forster's novels usually present a widowed mother with a daughter and a son. It is shown how the plot, dialogue and authorial intrusions are used to depict a liberation from the constraints of the Victorian ideals of family life. The mothers in the novels of both writers are shown to be representative of various aspects of the Victorian ideal of womanhood. The attitudes of men towards women vary from those typifying Victorian conceptions of male superiority to more modern ideals of equality and natural companionship. / digitalisering@umu

Le principal objectif de ce mémoire est l’étude de l’inscription de la maternité dans L’empreinte de l’ange, La virevolte et Prodige de Nancy Huston. Les trois romans précités constituent mon corpus de base. Néanmoins, des allusions à d’autres écrits de l’auteure, notamment à Journal de la création, donneront une plus grande profondeur à l’analyse, car on ne peut ni écarter les traces du thème de la maternité dans ses autres textes ni mésestimer l’influence de l’expérience de l’auteure sur son œuvre. Dans la foulée de la réflexion féministe contemporaine sur la maternité et faisant recours, selon le besoin, à la Nouvelle Histoire et à la psychanalyse, pour éclairer le contexte sociohistorique et le non-dit des textes, nous essaierons de dégager la singularité de l’écriture hustonienne en ce qui concerne ses idées sur la maternité. En effet, Nancy Huston s’inscrit dans la lignée d’écrivaines qui ont contribué à redéfinir l’identité féminine dans la fiction contemporaine en esquissant, à travers ses romans et essais, une multiplicité d’expériences féminines, toutes différentes, bien que plus ou moins soumises aux valeurs sociales dont l’auteure mesure la force. Nous abordons notre analyse par une mise en contexte historique, culturelle et éthique de la maternité. En effet, comme le thème de la maternité est omniprésent dans le discours social passé et contemporain, il est intéressent de voir comment Nancy Huston compose avec les stéréotypes traditionnellement attribués à la mère en suivant les enjeux, les conséquences et les variations de la maternité dans les œuvres à l’étude. Suivront à la mise en contexte historique et théorique les chapitres destinés à l’analyse des œuvres. Le deuxième chapitre portera sur L’empreinte de l’ange dévoilant les perplexités qui naissent d’une maternité non désirée et ombragée par les séquelles d’un passé tragique. Le troisième chapitre, consacré à l’analyse de La virevolte, s’articule autour de la tension entre la création et la procréation. Enfin, le quatrième et dernier chapitre aborde la maternité dans Prodige, roman où il est surtout question du lien entre emprise maternelle et construction de l’identité de la fille. À travers cette analyse, nous verrons comment Nancy Huston déconstruit le lieu commun voulant que la mère soit cet être idéalisé, privé de passions professionnelles et de pulsions artistiques, se dédiant uniquement à la protection et aux soins de l’enfant pour représenter plutôt des mères animées par des sentiments contradictoires, des mères qui se positionnent avant tout comme femmes sans inhiber leurs élans, leurs passions ni leurs tourments. / The main purpose of this master’s paper is the study of the theme of maternity in Nancy Huston’s novels L’empreinte de l’ange, La virevolte and Prodige. The three aforesaid novels constitute the basic corpus of our study. Nevertheless, allusions to the other essays by the author, in particular to Journal de la création, will give a major depth to the analysis, because we cannot push aside the traces of the theme of maternity in her other writings nor underestimate the influence of the experience of the author on her work. Influenced by the ideas of the contemporary feminist reflexion to redefine the maternal experience and recurring, according to the needs, to the New History’s and the psychoanalysis’s theories, to enlighten the sociohistorical context and the unspoken of the texts, we shall try to find the peculiarity of Nancy Huston’s writing regarding maternity. In fact, Nancy Huston, by sketching through her novels a multiplicity of feminine experiences more or less influenced by social values, joins the lineage of women writers which have contributed to redefine the feminine identity in contemporary fiction. We approach our analysis by an historical, cultural, and ethical contextualization of the ideas surrounding maternity. As the subject of maternity is present in the past and contemporary social discourse, it is interesting to see how Nancy Huston composes with stereotypes traditionally attributed to mothers by following the consequences and the variations of maternity in her novels. The study of the novels follows this contextualization. The second chapter concerns L’empreinte de l’ange and reveals the perplexities which arise from a maternity that is unwanted and shaded by the after effects of a tragic past. The third chapter, dedicated to the analysis of La virevolte is articulated around the tension between creation and procreation. Finally, the fourth and last chapter studies the theme of maternity in Prodigy, a novel that reveals the link between maternal influence and the construction of the daughter’s identity. Through this entire study, we shall see how Nancy Huston deconstructs the common idea wanting that the mother is an idealized being, deprived of professional passions and artistic drives, dedicated only to the protection and to the care of the child. On the contrary, the author represents mothers animated by contradictory feelings, mothers who position themselves as women without inhibiting their passions nor their agonies.

This explorative qualitative research investigates whether there is a difference in the symbolic meanings between the bulimic’s behaviour of purposefully expelling food versus the anorexic’s deprivation of food by administering the Thematic Apperceptive Test, as well as, conducting in-depth, semi-structured individual interviews with two bulimic women, two anorexic women of the restrictive sub-type and one anorexic woman of the binge-eating/ purging sub-type, whose ages ranged from twenty-one to thirty-five years of age. Both the conscious and unconscious themes that emerge from their stated relationship with food and their TAT responses are explored, with particular interest being focused on whether the symbolic meaning of food is in essence a “symbolic equation” for an object, specifically the mother and parental couple. The concept of “symbolic equation” is explored analytically from a Kleinian perspective to ascertain whether it is not food, per se that the anorexic is depriving herself of or that the bulimic suddenly and uncontrollably ingests, but then rapidly and violently expels. On the contrary, it appears that the refusal to introject or the ambivalent battle between introjection and expulsion of food is used as a disguise for the underlying conflictual object relation/s. The modified version of the Bellak Scoring System (1986) was used to analyse their TAT responses in order to elicit the themes that represent their internal worlds and object relations. Individual thematic content analysis was conducted on each interview transcript separately, and then a comparative analysis performed to explore commonalities and differences across the transcripts and TAT responses amongst the three anorexic women as a group and the bulimic women as a separate group. After which, the two different eating disorder groups were compared to explore both their differences and similarities. The findings suggest that a variety of conscious and unconscious motives might best be understood within the historical context of each participant’s early development and family dynamics. It appears that the anorexic is unconsciously motivated, at least partly, by her desire to repudiate any experience of dependency, separateness, loss, frustration, envy, fear, guilt and helplessness. Conversely, the bulimic appears to be motivated, at least partly, by the repetitive magical quest to restore a ‘good’ self-object bond and to stifle her destructiveness. Nonetheless, underlying both the anorexic’s and the bulimic’s illness is an ambivalent struggle with internalising a gainful and durable link to an object, which can in some way be permitted to be ‘good’. This appears to have its origin in the mother-daughter relationship, father-daughter relationship, parental couple, as well as, the triangular space between the mother-daughter-father link. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Psychology / unrestricted

This master’s thesis is concerned with the portrayal of motherhood and mother-daughter relationships on stage. By conducting performance analyses of three separate contemporary performances, all focused on mother-daughter relationships, the thesis investigates the creation of mother and daughter on stage. Through the lens of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory on postdramatic theatre, the thesis dissects aspects of the performances moving beyond the dramatic action to gain further insight into the portrayal of mother and daughter on stage. The thesis aims to investigate the aspects contributing to the creation of mother and daughter on stage, as well as analyse the conveyed meaning of the relationship between them. Combined with a feminist approach, the role of mother and daughter on stage is placed in a larger context, analysing motherhood as an institution and concept, both on and off stage. By understanding the intimate and complex mother-daughter relationship as a product of patriarchal structure, it becomes necessary and relevant to investigate this relationship further. Since the performances portray private relationships in a public space, the analysis is also concerned with the interrelation between the stage and the outside world. The analysed performances are Und dann kam Mirna at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, Kung Mor at Teater Galeasen in Stockholm and Mommy Issues at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm. The material for the thesis mainly consists of my experiences of the performances in the role of spectator and the theatre texts. By using Lehmann’s theory as a starting point, the analyses are centred around moving beyond the narrative to investigate other aspects on stage, such as objects, physicality, levels of reality, intertextuality, intermediality and the use of text on stage. The thesis dissects how these aspects contribute to the creation of mother and daughter on stage, as well as analyses the portrayed generational differences and their impact on the mother-daughter relationship in the performances. The analyses place the portrayed mothers and daughters into a larger context, by including concepts such as performativity and the male gaze. The thesis shows how the portrayal of motherhood and mother-daughter relationships on stage can be created by reaching beyond a narrative or a desired understandability. Together, the three performance analyses contribute with concluding insights into the internal logic and structures of the performances.

For most writers who deal with displacement, rewriting themselves, articulating and communicating their sense of estrangment is their lifetime work. For displacement forces one to leave behind the familiar and embrace the unknown. In this process of deconstruction, the concepts of home, belonging and identity are renegotiated and questioned constantly. Le Grand Voyage – the working title for the draft of a novel that is presented in conjunction with this exegesis – is a fictional work that is produced out of the implications of displacement, which inscribes itself in a series of explorations I started in 2001, cumulating with two video works Frammento in 2003 and Footnotes in 2004. Le Grand Voyage investigates further the concept of home by questioning the home/mother relationship. The exegesis aims to contextualise the making of Le Grand Voyage by using another woman’s narrative as the main point of reference: Linda Olsson’s Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs (2005). Olsson’s work – like mine – is conceived out of the effects of displacement, and the literary form and structure display symptoms that are characteristics to narratives of displacement. By putting the home/mother/daughter in context, the narrative displays home as a patriarchal construct showing how the idealisation of home/place is predicated on a gendering of home, whereby, as McDermott notes, ‘home is constructed as a maternal, static and past, to which the (male) subjects longs to return’ (2003: 265). The narrative’s point of view is that of daughters but also that of mothers as daughters, and enables not only a feminist discussion of the notion of home but also of motherhood. Therefore, the theoretical approach for this work has encompassed feminists’ writings that have particularly focused their research on space, place and gender. In challenging the dominant form of gender constructions and relations, the first and second wave feminism have empowered many women to leave home in order to shape their own version of identity. I believe it is within the perspective of displacement, of being out of place, that many women continue to find the necessary distance to contest a particular reading of woman and home that still prevails in academic literature and fiction. Thus, an important part of this exegesis concentrates on the critic of home. I want to argue in a feminist way that our ideas of home and belonging still reflect gendered assumptions and are therefore contestable. That displacement as a catalyst for loss, emotional grief and mourning becomes an enabling way for women to rethink home in terms of what was at play rather than in place and to do the ‘memory work’ that feminists ask women to do: to remember in order not to forget because ‘forgetting is a major obstacle to change’ (Greene, 1991: 298). Their attacks on the feminisation of place have opened up for me possibilities to think of home outside the parameters of sameness. They have also enabled me to understand the paradoxical position a displaced person is faced with: if displacement is favored and privileged why then do longings for home still persist for some? – a fact that is well illustrated in the actual resurgence of the preoccupation to belong. The gain in displacement also involves the fact that distance forces one to look at the longing and nostalgia for what they really conceal. In the case of a woman and, motherless daughters, distance, as this exegesis demonstrates, enables the writer to unveil the longings as subversive and fraudulent, tricking women into thinking there was nothing better than the past: home sweet home, the safe, bounded nest where women could be women: could be the mother. With the ‘memory work’ they both learn to think away from the parameters of sameness and the past, outside the nostalgic stances of singularity, safety, boundaries and internalised histories, therefore outside of the maternal, the home/mother relationship. ‘What is home?’ is a difficult question to negotiate for a woman. The exegesis and the first draft of the novel show what is at stake when one asks the question and the responsibility of women when writing about home.

For most writers who deal with displacement, rewriting themselves, articulating and communicating their sense of estrangment is their lifetime work. For displacement forces one to leave behind the familiar and embrace the unknown. In this process of deconstruction, the concepts of home, belonging and identity are renegotiated and questioned constantly. Le Grand Voyage – the working title for the draft of a novel that is presented in conjunction with this exegesis – is a fictional work that is produced out of the implications of displacement, which inscribes itself in a series of explorations I started in 2001, cumulating with two video works Frammento in 2003 and Footnotes in 2004. Le Grand Voyage investigates further the concept of home by questioning the home/mother relationship. The exegesis aims to contextualise the making of Le Grand Voyage by using another woman’s narrative as the main point of reference: Linda Olsson’s Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs (2005). Olsson’s work – like mine – is conceived out of the effects of displacement, and the literary form and structure display symptoms that are characteristics to narratives of displacement. By putting the home/mother/daughter in context, the narrative displays home as a patriarchal construct showing how the idealisation of home/place is predicated on a gendering of home, whereby, as McDermott notes, ‘home is constructed as a maternal, static and past, to which the (male) subjects longs to return’ (2003: 265). The narrative’s point of view is that of daughters but also that of mothers as daughters, and enables not only a feminist discussion of the notion of home but also of motherhood. Therefore, the theoretical approach for this work has encompassed feminists’ writings that have particularly focused their research on space, place and gender. In challenging the dominant form of gender constructions and relations, the first and second wave feminism have empowered many women to leave home in order to shape their own version of identity. I believe it is within the perspective of displacement, of being out of place, that many women continue to find the necessary distance to contest a particular reading of woman and home that still prevails in academic literature and fiction. Thus, an important part of this exegesis concentrates on the critic of home. I want to argue in a feminist way that our ideas of home and belonging still reflect gendered assumptions and are therefore contestable. That displacement as a catalyst for loss, emotional grief and mourning becomes an enabling way for women to rethink home in terms of what was at play rather than in place and to do the ‘memory work’ that feminists ask women to do: to remember in order not to forget because ‘forgetting is a major obstacle to change’ (Greene, 1991: 298). Their attacks on the feminisation of place have opened up for me possibilities to think of home outside the parameters of sameness. They have also enabled me to understand the paradoxical position a displaced person is faced with: if displacement is favored and privileged why then do longings for home still persist for some? – a fact that is well illustrated in the actual resurgence of the preoccupation to belong. The gain in displacement also involves the fact that distance forces one to look at the longing and nostalgia for what they really conceal. In the case of a woman and, motherless daughters, distance, as this exegesis demonstrates, enables the writer to unveil the longings as subversive and fraudulent, tricking women into thinking there was nothing better than the past: home sweet home, the safe, bounded nest where women could be women: could be the mother. With the ‘memory work’ they both learn to think away from the parameters of sameness and the past, outside the nostalgic stances of singularity, safety, boundaries and internalised histories, therefore outside of the maternal, the home/mother relationship. ‘What is home?’ is a difficult question to negotiate for a woman. The exegesis and the first draft of the novel show what is at stake when one asks the question and the responsibility of women when writing about home.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Media, Music, and Cultural Studies, 2009. / Bibliography: p. 303-332. / Carnal transcendence and sexual difference -- An amorous exchange -- Angels playing with placentas -- Fluid subjects -- Poetics -- Oneiric spaces -- Conclusion. / Carnal transcendence imagines a world in which the carnal has the weight and value of transcendence, and the divine is as liveable and readily evoked as the carnal. Carnal transcendence offers a means of thinking through difference in the work of Luce Irigaray, who asks: "why and how long ago did God withdraw from carnal love?" (1991a, p 16). This thesis argues that Irigaray enables her readers to explore the relationship between carnality, transcendence and difference, but resists elaborating it in her work. Carnal transcendence as difference risks remaining an exercise in rhetoric, rather than the transformative and creative philosophy that Irigaray imagines. -- Irigaray's resistance to the carnal is evident in her arguments for sexual difference, which offers our "salvation" if we think it through, and heralds "a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language: the creation of a new poetics" (1993a, p 5). Note the language of transcendence used here. When considered in the light of carnal transcendence, sexual difference imagines a differently sexed culture. This thesis argues that Irigaray's writing is contradictory on this point: it articulates the plurality of women's sexuality, but emphatically excludes theories of sex and gender that emphasise multiplicity. This thesis challenges these limitations by exploring the possibilities of the "other" couple in Irigaray's writing-mother and daughter - for thinking through carnal transcendence as difference. -- This thesis not only explicates a theoretical model for carnal transcendence as difference; it also attempts to put into practice a poetics - a playful rewriting of theory. This celebrates the carnality of Irigaray's writing - evident in her complex imagery of the two lips, mucus, the placenta and angels-and enables an exploration of the philosophical space of the "new poetics" that Irigaray is attempting to engender. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / 332 p. ill (some col.)

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Mon poste de psychologue clinicienne au sein d’une maison de retraite m’a sensibilisée à la souffrance psychique des aides-soignantes. A partir de l’écoute des aides-soignantes dans le cadre de ma mission de support technique à l’équipe, émerge la plainte récurrente d’un déficit égotiste de désinvestissement émotionnel et affectif et la non reconnaissance de la pénibilité de leur tâche, qui me conduit à poser l’hypothèse d’un burn out. La recherche porte donc sur le Syndrome d’Épuisement Professionnel. Elle étudie les relations complexes entre le personnel médico-social aides-soignantes et la cadre de santé, et entre la personne âgée et sa fille. Un questionnaire clinique a fait ressortir l’ampleur du ressenti subjectif d’être épuisé. L’échelle standardisée MSP de Louise Lemyre, celle du ressenti subjectif d’être stressé. Le stress étant convoqué dans la position conceptuelle théorique retenue du Syndrome d’Épuisement Professionnel.L’analyse de ces deux ressentis a révélé les rapports complexes entre soignante–soignée et la cadre et entre fille–mère et grand-mère. C’est ainsi que l’enjeu narcissique du personnel fait ressurgir les origines archaïques de la sexualité infantile dans le lien intime au corps. En même temps, à cause d’une féminisation généralisée de la profession, la spécificité de la fonction du Féminin Psychique s’impose.Cette recherche souhaite apporter, grâce à ce Féminin Psychique, un éclairage autre sur la position intermédiaire de la Cadre. Le statut de bonne ou mauvaise mère que les aides-soignantes lui reconnaissent, aggrave ou diminue le Syndrome d’Épuisement Professionnel et le stress. Enfin, cette recherche insiste une nouvelle fois sur la nécessité impérieuse de la formation permanente institutionnelle et du travail d’élaboration psychique de ces personnels et ce, à périodicités constantes. / As a psychologist in an EHPAD (a regulated home for dependent seniors), I became very much aware of the auxiliary nurses’ psychological sufferings. Listening to them during my team-supporting mission, I heard a recurring complaint emerge, that of an egotistical deficit of emotional and affective disinvestment and of a lack of recognition of the painfulness of their task. This has led me to hypothesize professional exhaustion. The research in this thesis therefore focuses on the burn out syndrome. It studies the complex relations between the auxiliary nurses as medico-social staff and the health manager in charge as well as between the elderly person and his/her daughter.A clinical questionnaire highlighted the depth of the subjective feeling of exhaustion while Louise Lemyre’s standardized scale highlighted the depth of the subjective feeling of stress, an operational notion in the theoretical concept of burn out.The analysis of both feelings revealed the complex relations between patient-auxiliary nurse and manager as well as between daughter-mother and grandmother. The narcissism at stake with the staff reactivates the archaic origins if child sexuality in the nursing place. A t the same time, because of the general feminization of the profession, the specificity of the feminine psyche is of foremost importance.Thanks to this notion, the research paper aims to shed a different light on the intermediary position of the manager. The status of good or bad mother figure that auxiliary nurses grant her worsens or lessens the burn out and stress.Last, this research paper further insists on the absolute necessity of permanent institutional training and of psychic elaborative work for the staff at regular intervals.