Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce all have a deep interest in the problem of the mother, and especially in the problem of the mother figured as a problem of the self. The main focus of their work is the identity of the self and how problematic it is to find or preserve that identity. In this quest, they raise some of the general concerns of modernism about origins. Since origins are a major aspect of self-definition, here is where the problem of motherhood begins. This thesis explores the mother figure as seen through the psychoanalytical lens of Freud. By using such Freudian concepts as narcissism, melancholy, and the death instinct, it focuses on the mother figure as she relates to the child or child figures, to the world, and to her own function as a mother and shows how Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce cooperate with Freud in defining for mothers a central role in the modern self's investigations of its origins. For Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce, the mother figure is something other than a specific person. Although the actual mother in the novels I study is physically out of reach, she is still present as a psychological projection of the self, so that even though the self can grow out of its biological need for the mother, it is impossible to grow out of the epistemological need for her. Thus, my analyses of the mother figure are concerned with what the mother is not, or should not be---since inheritance, history, and identity can emerge only if there is something beyond the mother as a specific person, some continuity leading from the mother outward to what is beyond her. And it is precisely this function of continuity, rather than the individual physical experience of having a child, that I define as motherhood proper. All three authors investigate the relationship of a specific female human being to motherhood, and the degree to which the mother as a concrete human being is more, less, or other than motherhood, as well as the ways in which motherhood is something more than the individual. The mother figure is ontologically dead/unavailable as origin for Woolf, physically dead/sexually unavailable for Lawrence, and historically dead/unavailable as inheritance for Joyce. For Woolf, there are doubts that the mother ever existed in the past (lack of continuity); for Lawrence, that she exists in the present (lack of contemporaneity); and for Joyce, that she will be reincarnated in the future (lack of chronology). But in all three of them, motherhood emerges as problematic and ambivalent, and, if its status and authority are restored, it is only through the struggle and growth of the individual self.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/6445 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Totev, Stela Kostova. |
| Contributors | Childs, Donald J., |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 557 p. |
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