Abstract
Combining myth analysis with Julia Kristeva’s 1980 formulation of abjection, Dokou explores the consummate horror scenario of a mother becoming infanticide under duress, as depicted in Euripides’s Medea and the African American Medeas of Frances Harper’s second “Slave Mother” poem (1874) and Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. The texts are used to elucidate a reversal of the Kristevan developmental model, showing that the archetypal horror they depict is that of the mother abjecting the child, and not the other way around, as Kristeva’s elaboration on Lacanian psycholinguistics suggests. Such a horrific rejection of, and simultaneous absolute claim on, the infant as occurs in maternal infanticide brings to the fore the evils of what Freud called “social neuroses,” like slavery, that cause this distortion of maternal love.
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Notes
- 1.
On the Triple Goddess, see Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, FSG Classics series (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013); also, Carl Gustav Jung, “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” in vol. 11 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung—Psychology and Religion: West and East, translated by R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series 20 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958, pp. 107–200).
- 2.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud observes his toddler grandson Ernst hiding and retrieving a spool on a string while ritualistically repeating the words “fort” (“gone”) and “da” (there) and theorizes (originally in a 1920 essay) that the hidden-retrieved object stands for the mother, whose absence, even momentary, generates in the child an unbearable anxiety on the horrific prospect that she may never return, and, hence, his only source of nurturing, love, and life support will be gone.
- 3.
On Euripides’s infanticidal innovation, see Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, 4.56; also, Emily McDermott, Euripides’ Medea: The Incarnation of Disorder (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1985).
- 4.
Jean Anouilh, Médée (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1946); Cherríe Moraga, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (New York: West End Press, 2001).
- 5.
According to Creophylus’s scholium in Medea (p. 264).
- 6.
Although I have consulted Kovacs’s text for the original Greek, the translation of the verses is mine.
- 7.
As per Southern painter Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s famous 1867 painting of Garner’s deed under that title; see also Steven Weisenburger’s Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder in the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999).
- 8.
This poem is not to be confused with a poem written at roughly the same time and titled simply “The Slave Mother,” in which Harper portrays a mother whose child is separated and sold away from her at a slave auction. It was first published in Harper’s best-known collection, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (Boston: J.B. Yerrington and Son, 1854).
- 9.
For a detailed and insightful literary analysis of Harper’s poem in comparison with Morrison’s Beloved , see the relevant chapter in Wendy Dasler Johnson’s Antebellum American Women’s Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016).
- 10.
Regarding Cullen’s play, which falls under a different genre than the two works examined here, Lillian Corti notes, “the works of Brent, Stowe, Chopin, and Cullen himself suggest that the relationship between racism and child murder was well known to various writers well before the dissemination of militant ideology in the second half of this century” (1998, p. 625).
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Dokou, C. (2018). The Mother of All Horrors: Medea’s Infanticide in African American Literature. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_31
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