Mothers
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45 Jacques Guillimeau, The Nursing of Children, affixed to Childbirth, or the Happy Delivery of Women (London: printed by Anne Griffin, for Joyce Norton and Richard Whitaker, 1635), cited in Adelman, p. 6.
46 Ibid., Preface 1.i.2; also Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent, Ohio: Kent University Press, 1982), pp. 51–2, cited in Adelman, p. 7.
47 Aeschylus, The Oresteian Trilogy, trans. Philip Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), Part III, Eumenides, ll. 656–61 (emphasis mine)
48 Ibid., ll. 109–10.
49 Ibid., ll. 605–7.
50 Sophocles, Electra, II, ll. 532–33, cited in Rachel Bowlby, Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities (Oxford: OUP, 2007), p. 211.
51 My thanks to Edith Hall for this information.
52 Robert Icke, adaptation of Sophocles’ Oresteia (London: Oberon, 2015), p. 119.
53 Ibid., p. 60.
54 Ibid., p. 118.
55 See Amber Jacobs, On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), for the fullest reckoning with this story and its implications.
56 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ll. 117–20.
57 Colm Tóibín, House of Names (London: Viking, 2017).
58 André Green, Un Œil en trop: Le Complexe d’Œdipe dans la tragédie (Paris: Minuit, 1969), trans. p. 80 cited in Jacobs.
59 Rachel Bowlby, A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories (Oxford: OUP, 2013), p. 114.
60 Elena Ferrante, citing Elsa Morante, ‘Mothers’ Dressmakers’, in Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (New York: Europa, 2016), p. 17.
61 Hamlet, First Quarto, 1603, 11, 53–54.
62 Hamlet, First Folio, 1623, 3. iv. 15–16.
63 Ibid., 3. iv. 166.
64 Icke, p. 117.
65 Genevieve Lively, ‘Mater Amoris: Mothers and Lovers in Augustan Rome’, in Hackworth Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell, p. 197.
66 Patricia Salzman-Mitchell, ‘Tenderness or Taboo: Images of Breast-Feeding Mothers in Greek and Latin Literature’, in Hackworth Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell, pp. 150–51.
67 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, Volume I, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
68 Rhiannon Stephens, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 2013).
69 Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pache (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 51.
70 Euripides, Medea, Introduction, p. 70.
71 Ibid., ll. 1366, 1368–69, p. 130.
72 Ibid., ll. 1060–62, p. 117.
73 Véronique Olmi, Bord de mer/Beside the Sea, trans. Adriana Hunter (London: Peirene, 2010), p. 68.
74 Margaret Reynolds, ‘Performing Medea: or, Why Is Medea a Woman?’, in Medea in Performance, 1500–2000, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), p. 139, p. 140.
75 Christa Wolf, Medea: A Modern Retelling, trans. John Cullen (London: Virago, 1998), p. 7.
76 Ibid., pp. 111–13.
77 Ibid., p. 80.
78 Ibid.
79 Rich, p. 270.
80 W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), p. 13.
81 Wolf, pp. 1–2.
PSYCHIC BLINDNESS: LOVING
1 Roald Dahl, Matilda (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988; Puffin, 2013), p. 4.
2 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton 1986, 1995), p. xxxiii.
3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 473.
4 Ibid.
5 Virginia Woolf, The Years, 1937 (Oxford: OUP, 1992), p. 359 (emphasis mine).
6 Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), p. 8.
7 Ibid., p. 137.
8 Rich, p. xxiv.
9 Mary-Kay Wilmers, ‘Views’, Listener, May 1972.
10 Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (London: Virago, 1983).
11 Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach, Understanding Women: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Approach (London: Penguin, 1985); Rozsika Parker, Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence (London: Virago, 1995); and Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (London: Routledge, 2009). Baraitser is also co-founder of MaMSIE (Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics), a network based in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck University of London, which publishes the journal Studies in the Maternal.
12 Michel Onfray, Théorie du corps amoureux (Paris: LGF, 2007), p. 219–20, cited in Elisabeth Badinter, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, trans. Adriana Hunter (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012), p. 125.
13 Badinter, p. 69.
14 Ibid., pp. 67–84.
15 Ibid., p. 73.
16 Haroon Siddique, ‘Less than half of women breastfeed after two months’, Guardian, 23 March 2017.
17 Hadley Freeman, ‘Never let me go’, Guardian magazine, 30 July 2016.
18 Jake Dypka and Hollie McNish, ‘Embarrassed’, Channel 4, Random Acts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6nHrqIFTj8. In 2017, McNish won the Ted Hughes Award. McNish: ‘I always attracted mums and midwives, Now I get poetry lovers.’ Guardian, 16 June 2017. See also Rachel Epp Buller, ‘Performing the Breastfeeding Body: Lactivism and Art Intervention’, Studies in the Maternal, 8:2, 2016, p. 14.
19 Letters, London Review of Books, 36:14, 17 July 2014.
20 Helene Deutsch, ‘The Psychology of Woman in Relation to the Functions of Reproduction’, 1925, in Robert Fliess, The Psychoanalytic Reader (New York: International Universities Press, 1969).
21 Wilmers, ‘Views’.
22 Courtney Love, ‘Plump’, ‘Softest, Softest’, ‘I Think That I Would Die’. Thanks to Barry Schwabsky for alerting me to these lyrics.
23 Toni Morrison, Icon Critical Guides, ed. Carl Plasa (Cambridge, MA: Icon Books, 1998), p. 36.
24 Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), p. 51.
25 Ibid., p. 209.
26 See also Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
27 Stephanie J. Shaw, ‘Mothering under Slavery in the Antebellum South’, in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang and Linda Rennie Forcey (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 249.
28 Patricia Hill Collins, ‘The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother–Daughter Relationships’, in Double Stitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters (New York: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 53.
29 Ibid., p. 8.
30 Sindiwe Magona, Living, Loving, and Lying Awake at Night (Claremont, South Africa: David Philip, 1991), p. 5.
31 Ibid., p. 6.
32 Ibid., p. 7.
33 Ibid., p. 16.
34 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007).
35 Edith Wharton, The Mother’s Recompense, 1925 (Teddington: Wildhern Press, 2008), p. 33.
36 Ibid., p. 7.
37 Ibid., p. 9.
38 Ibid., p. 30.
39 Cited in Lee, p. 627.
40 Lee, p. 330.
41 Wharton, p. 34.
42 Ibid., p. 66.
43 Rich, p. 252.
44 Wharton, pp. 101–2.
45 Ibid., p. 46.
46 Lee, p. 630.
47 �
�Ibid., p. 110, p. 127.
48 Ibid., p. 110.
49 Ibid., p. 110, p. 120.
50 Ibid., p. 123, p. 83.
51 Ibid., p. 97.
52 Ibid., p. 77.
53 Ibid., p. 131.
54 Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), p. 53.
55 Ibid., p. 76.
56 Ibid., p. 162.
57 Ibid., pp. 133–4.
PSYCHIC BLINDNESS: HATING
1 Bruno Bettelheim, cited in Elisabeth Badinter, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, trans. Adriana Hunter (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012), p. 45.
2 Nina Sutton, Bruno Bettelheim: The Other Side of Madness (London: Duckworth, 1995).
3 D. W. Winnicott, ‘Hate in the Counter-Transference’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30:2, 1949, p. 73 (also in Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers of D. W. Winnicott, London: Routledge, 1992).
4 Ibid., p. 74.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Daisy Waugh, I Don’t Know Why She Bothers: Guilt-Free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Women (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013), p. 14.
9 Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. 21.
10 Winnicott, p. 72.
11 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976, 1995), p. xxxiii.
12 Bechdel, p. 258.
13 Ibid., p. 178.
14 Ibid., p. 68.
15 Ibid., p. 172.
16 Ibid., p. 65.
17 Sylvia Plath, Three Women – A Poem for Three Voices, 1962, in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1981).
18 Ibid., p. 181, p. 186, pp. 180–1.
19 Ibid., p. 181.
20 Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, 21 and 25 October 1962, in Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, selected and edited with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath (London: Faber, 1975), p. 473, p. 477.
21 Melanie Klein, ‘Some Reflections on The Oresteia’, in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), p. 299.
22 All quotes from W. R. Bion, ‘Container and Contained’, 1962, in Attention and Interpretation (London: Karnac, 1970), p. 72, p. 78.
23 Melissa Benn, Madonna and Child: Towards a New Politics of Motherhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), p. 21.
24 Estela Welldon, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood (London: Karnac, 1988), pp. 78–9.
25 Brid Featherstone, ‘“I wouldn’t do your job!” Women, Social Work and Child Abuse’, in Mothering and Ambivalence, ed. Wendy Hollway and Brid Featherstone (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 167.
26 Ibid., p. 185.
27 Rich, p. 279.
28 Ibid., p. xxxv.
29 Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe, folio II, p. 351, translated and edited by H. M. Parshley, 1953 (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 513 (all translations modified).
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., folio I, p. 59, p. 112 (trans. p. 55, p. 94).
32 Ibid., p. 93.
33 Ibid., p. 390.
34 Ibid., II, p. 351 (trans. p. 513).
35 Ibid., II, p. 372 (trans. p. 528–529).
36 Ibid., II, p. 349 (trans. p. 512).
37 Ibid., I, p. 93 (trans. p. 82).
38 Ibid., II, p. 381 (trans. p. 354).
39 Ibid., II, p. 385 (trans. p. 537).
40 See Julia Kristeva, Je me voyage – Mémoires: Entretiens avec Samuel Dock (Paris: Fayard, 2017) p. 148, p. 157, p. 188. See also Kristeva’s extraordinary split-page meditation on classical and religious icons of maternity alongside her account of the birth of her son, ‘Stabat Mater,’ 1977, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
41 Rivka Galchen, Little Labours (New York: New Directions, 2016; London: Fourth Estate, 2017), p. 7.
42 Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2016), p. 65.
THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY: ELENA FERRANTE
1 Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2016), p. 252.
2 Ibid., p. 177, p. 252.
3 Ibid., p. 187.
4 Ibid., p. 206.
5 Ibid., p. 188.
6 D. W. Winnicott, ‘The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identification’, 1968, in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971); Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, London: Virago, 1988) is the classic feminist psychoanalytic text for exploring the agonistic side of the mother–baby interaction.
7 Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment, 2002, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2005), p. 168.
8 Elena Ferrante, Troubling Love, 1992, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2006), p. 113.
9 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 17.
10 Ibid., p. 220.
11 Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter, 2006, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2008), p. 206.
12 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 254, p. 267.
13 Ibid., p. 267.
14 Ferrante, Lost Daughter, p. 53.
15 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 347, p. 350.
16 Zoe Williams, ‘Why baby books make you miserable’, Guardian, 3 October, 2017.
17 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 198.
18 Ibid., p. 220.
19 Ibid., p. 251.
20 Ferrante, Days of Abandonment, p. 127.
21 John Bell, Sophie Boyron and Simon Whittaker, Principles of French Law (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 264.
22 Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay – Middle Time, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2014), p. 372.
23 Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name – Youth, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2013), p. 112.
24 Ferrante, Lost Daughter, p. 124.
25 Ferrante, Story of a New Name, p. 311.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., p. 91.
28 Ferrante, Lost Daughter, p. 87.
29 Ibid., p. 37, p. 23.
30 Ibid., p. 122.
31 Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend – Childhood, Adolescence, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2012), p. 322.
32 Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, p. 76.
33 Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child – Maturity, Old Age, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa, 2015), p. 151.
34 Ibid., p. 208.
35 Ferrante, Troubling Love, p. 87.
36 Ibid., p 139.
37 Ferrante, Frantumaglia, p. 122, p. 140.
38 Ibid., p. 326.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 277.
41 Ibid., p. 379.
42 Ibid., p. 380.
43 Ibid., p. 224.
44 Ibid., p. 221.
45 Ibid., p. 222.
46 Ferrante, Lost Daughter, p. 124, p. 122.
47 Ferrante, Story of a New Name, p. 113.
48 Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, p. 233.
49 Ibid., Story of a New Name, p. 378.
50 Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, p. 238.