Abstract
Karen McPherson offers a reading of the intersections of aging and the mother–daughter relationship in Hélène Cixous’s Ève s’évade: La ruine et la vie and Louise Dupré’s L’album multicolore. In these two authors’ autobiographical accounts of their elderly mothers’ final years, the stages of a life overlap and circle back over one another. A daughter’s experience of the impending loss of the mother resonates with her own aging and gives her a new perspective both on that relationship and on her own life and mortality. The death of the mother may be a defining moment, but the relationship with the elderly mother over time is a defining stage, raising questions about identity and relationship that persist and evolve over the course of women’s lives.
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Notes
- 1.
Writings in which the orphaned child expresses ambivalence about her relationship (or lack thereof) with the departed parent include Warland’s Bloodroot and Daviau’s Ma mère et Gainsbourg.
- 2.
Three celebrated texts in which a son’s loss of his mother is inscribed are Le livre de ma mère by Albert Cohen, W, ou le souvenir d’enfance by Georges Perec, and Journal de deuil by Roland Barthes.
- 3.
For an analysis of the literary treatment of the loss of the mother in works by Madeleine Gagnon, Diane-Monique Daviau, Betsy Warland, and Genevieve Amyot, see the chapter “The Language of Grief” in my book Archaeologies. In this chapter, I refer to “the agonizing paradox of mourning” (34).
- 4.
For example Colette, Beauvoir, Ernaux, Gagnon, Vozenilek, and Edelman.
- 5.
We find striking examples of this kind of writing in the face of loss, for instance, in Geneviève Amyot’s Je t’écrirai encore demain, Madeleine Gagnon’s Le vent majeur, Louise Warren’s La forme et le deuil, and Denise Desautels’s Tombeau de Lou and Ce désir toujours.
- 6.
In addition to being the midwife, Cixous’s mother bears the name of the first woman, Eve, proto-mother in Judeo-Christian mythology. In a sense she may therefore be seen to represent—in one little, evasive, palindromic name—a woman’s story and legacy that extend beyond her own individual life, however long that life may be.
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McPherson, K. (2016). Writing the Mother Immortal: Cixous and Dupré. 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_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40850-7_10
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