Love between Women — Wollstonecraft’s Early Writings

Abstract

Butler recapitulates the aspects of object-relations psychoanalysis that recognise the maternal body as the eclipsed ground on which the subject achieves signification: ‘repudiation of the maternal body is the condition of signification within the Symbolic’. Signification through language, according to this position, is founded on a ‘primary repression’ of desire for the maternal body. The subject’s ‘loss’ of the maternal body establishes ‘the empty space out of which words originate’. (Butler, 1990, p. 68) Walker assesses the implications of female-embodiment for this psychoanalytic model of language signification. She highlights especially the impact of shared morphology between daughter and mother, which offers a different relation to the repressed maternal body than that assumed of the male-embodied subject in psychoanalysis generally. Women enter language on different terms, and under different conditions, to men. Walker characterises masculinist writing as an ‘attempt to symbolise the abject space’ of the pre-oedipal. (p. 66) Masculinist writing, she argues, approaches signification through a psychotic gesture of foreclosing the maternal body, and taking its place (as in the fort-da scenario). She understands the abject as that which ‘threatens the masculine writer with a suffocating return to the archaic maternal body’.

It is in and through writing that [women] seek to speak with rather than for the mother…

(Walker, 1998, p. 162)