UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Reclaimed Experience: Gendering Trauma in Slavery, Holocaust, and Madness Narratives. A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies by Nathalie Ségeral 2012 © Copyright by Nathalie Ségeral 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Reclaimed Experience: Gendering Trauma in Slavery, Holocaust, and Madness Narratives. by Nathalie Ségeral Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Laure Murat, Chair. How does a woman writer memorialize her own traumatic history, when it happens to be part of a larger History dominated by male narratives (as far as Holocaust and slavery go), or when it is altogether silenced (as is the case for madness and institutionalization)? This work applies interdisciplinary memory studies to the gendering of trauma in eight contemporary historical and (auto) fictional narratives. The common point among these authors lies in their suffering from a triple alienation: as women, as dominated subjects in history, and as writers kept at the margins of the literary canons. Following Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory,”1 which demonstrates how marginalized collective memories interact productively instead of competing with one another, this study reads in conversation Black women writing about slavery (Maryse Condé and Toni Morrison), Jewish and non-Jewish women writing about the Holocaust (Charlotte Delbo, Sarah Kofman, and Cécile Wajsbrot), and (formerly) mad women writing about madness (Leonora Carrington, Emma Santos, and Unica Zürn). So far, the commonality between women’s writings of slavery and of the Holocaust has barely been touched upon in French and Francophone literature, and their potential kinship with texts by mad women has not been studied at all. They resort to a set of shared tropes, in order to reclaim their stories: ghosts, metaphorical and historical infanticidal mothers, distorted lineages, and rewritten fairy tales and myths, which are used – albeit in different ways – by all of them, so as to debunk myths held by male narratives about “femininity.” Thus, in the process of re-appropriating the traumatic history they have inherited, or experienced first-hand, these writers blur gender boundaries by 1 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009). ii deconstructing the notion of “motherhood.” If multidirectional memory emphasizes trauma as a link between cultures, it can thereby be furthered by being applied to gender studies, and extended to a realm of literature located outside of history, and yet, anchored in it: the writing of madness. A close study of how the memory of the traumatic past becomes literature in eight texts serves to emphasize how the circulation of recurring tropes among narratives dealing with different time periods and different types of traumas creates a resonance among these writers, allowing them to reclaim agency and giving rise to a transnational literary voice of the gendering of trauma. Ultimately, this project’s aim is to create a multidirectional feminist trauma theory. iii The dissertation of Nathalie Ségeral is approved. Françoise Lionnet Andrea Loselle John McCumber Laure Murat, Committee Chair. University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ...............................................................................................ii INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 1 PART I: Gendering Slavery. .......................................................................................................... 24 Chapter 1: Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba sorcière… Noire de Salem and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. ...... 27 I Magical Realism and Ghostly Lineages: Towards a Creolization of History?............................. 29 1) Ghosts of Memory:............................................................................................................... 29 2) Re-Staging Traumatic History as a Reversed Fairy Tale:....................................................... 47 II. Murdered Babies, Silenced Histories:........................................................................................ 58 1) Rewriting the “Mother-Daughter Plot”:................................................................................. 58 2) Rewriting Gender: Trauma and (De-)gendering:.................................................................... 68 3) Towards a Black Feminist Rewriting of Western Master Narratives: ..................................... 75 PART II: Gendering the Holocaust: Memory, Postmemory, and the “Mother” Tongue........................ 89 Chapter 2: “La notion même de famille est empoisonnée”: Cécile Wajsbrot, Sarah Kofman, and Charlotte Delbo...................................................................................................................................... 94 I. Ghosts of Memory:.................................................................................................................... 98 1) Ghosts and Fairy Tales: Returning to Spectral Roots: ............................................................ 98 2) Spectral Writing: A Narrative of Possession:....................................................................... 116 II. Memory, Postmemory, and the “Mother” Tongue: When (Re)Telling Becomes Surviving......... 122 1) (Re-)embodying memory: “Ne regardez pas”: Gendering the Holocaust through Staging the Obscene. ..................................................................................................................................... 122 2) Translating Trauma: the “Mother” Tongue and the Dissolved Boundaries of the Self:.......... 132 PART III: Gendering Madness. ........................................................................................................ 152 Chapter 3: Gendering Madness in Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn, and Emma Santos: Surrealist Lineages, Hyperbolic Femininity, and the Figure of the Child-(M)other. ............................................ 153 I) Body, Time, and the Space of Madness:................................................................................... 162 1) Re-inscribing Madness in History: ...................................................................................... 164 a) Historicizing Madness:................................................................................................... 164 b) Embodying Madness Through the Scar: ......................................................................... 175 2) Dream and Timelessness: ................................................................................................... 181 a) Intertextualities:............................................................................................................. 184 b) (De)Idealizing Childhood:.............................................................................................. 186 c) The Mother, the Little Girl and the Princess: Dramatizing Madness Through the Double:190 II Surrealist Lineages:................................................................................................................ 197 1) Maternal Delusions (re-creating one’s story):...................................................................... 198 2) The Child-(M)other, the “Pseudogyne,” and the Mother Tongue: ........................................ 207 III Gendering Madness through Surrealism:................................................................................. 219 1) Rewriting Nadja: ................................................................................................................ 220 a) Returning the Gaze through the Medusa figure:.............................................................. 222 b) Nadja talks back:............................................................................................................ 228 2) Gendering Surrealism:........................................................................................................ 233 a) Surrealist Madness:........................................................................................................ 233 b) The Virgin as (Pro)Creator: Rewriting the Surrealist Concept of the Immaculate Conception: 243 Conclusion....................................................................................................................................... 256 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to begin by thanking my advisor, Professor Laure Murat, for her continuous support and encouragement, and for helping me through many obstacles. Her mentoring has been invaluable. I am also very grateful for my committee members’ support, help, and insights – especially Professors Françoise Lionnet and Andrea Loselle. My heart-felt thanks go to the faculty of the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies, for so warmly welcoming me in September 2007 and for providing me with close guidance in my academic pursuits ever since. Special thanks to Professors Malina Stefanovska and Eric Gans in countless regards. I would also like to thank the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, for awarding me a UCLA/Mellon Fellowship on Holocaust Studies in American and World Cultures during the Summers 2009 and 2010, as well as