The Mother / Daughter Plot

Mothers and daughtersthe female figures neglected by classic psychoanalysis and submerged in traditional narrativeare at the center of this book. The novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers from the Western European and North American traditions reveal that the story of motherhood remains the unspeakable plot of Western culture. Focusing on the feminine and, more controversially, on the maternal, this book alters our perception of both the familial structures basic to traditional narrativethe Oedipus storyand the narrative structures basic to traditional representations of the familyFreud's family romance. Confronting psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation with narrative theories, Marianne Hirsch traces the emergence and transformation of female family romance patterns from Jane Austen to Marguerite Duras.