Abstract
Laurie Corbin reads Hélène Cixous’s Le jour où je n’étais pas là as a deeply personal reflection on what is a fiercely contested concept in many societies: the responsibility of the mother. In her analysis, Corbin discusses the mother–child relationship as emblematic of how human responsibility to others may be figured by the concepts of abandoning and giving. She notes that this text not only continues Cixous’s work on le don, a concept central to her views on femininity since her early essays, but also participates in a discourse on the maternal shaped over the course of the twentieth century by such diverse thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Simone de Beauvoir, and Luce Irigaray.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Like many of her works since the 1990s, Le jour où je n’étais pas là can be understood as fiction that makes use more or less exactly of events of Cixous’s own life, with a narrator who speaks in the first person but cannot be considered identical to the author.
- 2.
“Sorties” by Cixous was published the same year in La jeune née with some of the same material that I am quoting from “Le rire de la méduse.”
- 3.
Gill Rye’s “‘Maternité rendue, maternité perdue’: The Return of/to the Past in Le jour où je n’étais pas là” also examines, among other questions, the ways in which a woman’s understanding of herself as a mother is changed by the death of a child.
- 4.
The status of animals has an important place in much of Cixous’s work, as discussed in Marta Segarra’s article “Hélène Cixous’s Other Animal: The Half-Sunken Dog.”
- 5.
See chapter 7 in Élisabeth Badinter’s Le conflit on the particular situation of French women.
- 6.
Eilene Hoft-March notes the attention given to the words “défaut” and “faute” in this text in her article “For-Giving Death: Cixous’s Osnabrück and Le jour où je n’étais pas là.”
- 7.
Gill Rye discusses the “dynamic between choice (or act) and judgement and responsibility” in “Maternité rendue, maternité perdue” (104).
- 8.
It is not possible for me to address and develop in this essay the numerous explicit and implicit references to the Holocaust in Le jour où je n’étais pas là, such as Cixous’s attendance of the film Un spécialiste, in which Adolf Eichmann defends his actions, but this is clearly a part of Cixous’s reflections on how lives are judged as valuable or not.
- 9.
My understanding of these lines differs from that of the published translation (The Day I Wasn’t There 56).
- 10.
The edition cited here has exactly 190 pages.
- 11.
The singular noun used without an indefinite article is worth noting. I would suggest that this treatment of the word “crime” gives it more weight: it is not “a crime” but “crime,” an abstract concept that becomes even more imposing in this condemnation.
- 12.
See Schrift’s “Logics of the Gift in Cixous and Nietzsche” for a discussion of the gift that is not acknowledged by the giver.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Corbin, L. (2016). Aban-donner: The Maternal in Le jour où je n’étais pas là . In: Ramond Jurney, F., McPherson, K. (eds) Women’s Lives in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40850-7_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40850-7_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40849-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-40850-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)