| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 87 === As women writers of this century have more and more insisted on articulating the forms of their own experience, the figure of the mother has begun to re-emerge as a central locus of feminist explorations. Latest developments and directions in critical theory have helped us learn to read the mother figure and mother-child relationship from different perspectives. This figure which has long been pushed aside or held under by “the narcissistic language of the son (or the female son)” deserves our serious and repeated consideration. My project in this dissertation, proceeding from the feminist psychoanalytic investigation of the maternal figure and mother-daughter relationship, is to participate in the production of new paradigms for thinking about both female experience and literary experience. By conflating psychoanalytic theorization of mothering and mother-child relationship in two different periods -- 1920s and 1970s -- with contemporaneous women’s fictional writings dealing with these same topoi, I wish to sketch a hypothesis of a “paradigm shift” between these two periods. In light of such conflation, I explore, through selected texts in psychoanalysis and fictional representations, two distinct maternal paradigms─the paradigm of maternal sacrifice in the 1920s and the paradigm of maternal empowerment in the 1970s and 80s. The aim is to arrive at a contemplation of these two paradigms which reflect a major shift of consciousness within these two periods in both psychoanalytic and literary narratives.
In Chapter One I investigate psychoanalytic theories of mothering and mother-child relationship in two phases: Freud, object-relations theorists Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott in the 1920s, and Nancy Chodorow, Adrienne Rich and Luce Irigaray in the 1970s and 1980s. Discussion of androcentric cultural context in the 1920s and the endeavor of constructing a specifically female cultural space in the 1970s and 1980s will be dealt with in length. In Chapter Two I analyze how two women writers in the 1920s -- Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton -- re-presented the mother figure and mother-daughter relationship as under patriarchal construction in their novels. Their fictions to a certain extent adumbrate the post-Victorian ideology of impeccable and self-sacrificial motherhood as embedded in Freud’s, Klein’s and Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theories. In Chapter Three I explore the way two women writers in the 1970s and 80s -- Margaret Atwood and Marilynne Robinson -- engaged in an almost impossible task of constructing a female cultural “wild zone” in their novels. This attempt at writing specifically about women’s quest for a lost/absent maternal figure so as to empower them corroborate Chodorow’s, Rich’s and Irigaray’s notions of envisaging a new and non-phallocentric perspective of mother-daughter relationship.
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