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Longing and Belonging 1. See Simone De Beauvoir, the Second Sex, Trans Notes Home Matters: Longing and Belonging 1. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (1953; rpt., New York:Knopf, 1971); and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mys- tique (1963; rpt., New York:Dell, 1964). 2. A number of novels by women published during the late 1960s and the 1970s mirrored those views, representing the perspective of the trapped woman or “mad housewife” who felt compelled to leave home to escape from the tyranny of domesticity and to find herself. Representative novels include Sue Kaufman, The Diary of a Mad Housewife (New York: Random House, 1967); Anne Richardson Roiphe, Up the Sandbox (New York:Simon and Schuster, 1970); Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973); and Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (New York: Summit, 1977). 3. Susan Stanford Friedman uses the phrase “locational feminism” to suggest an expanded feminist discourse based upon “the assumption of changing historical and geographical specificities that produce different feminist the- ories, agendas, and political practices. Locational feminism requires a geopolitical literacy that acknowledges the interlocking dimension of global cultures, the way in which the local is always informed by the global and the global by the local.” Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5. 4. The exiled Somalian writer Nuruddin Farah joins the political and meta- physical meanings of exile in his answer to his own question,“What is the topic of literature? It began with the expulsion of Adam from Paradise. What, in fact, writers do is to play around either with the myth of creation or with the myth of return. And in between, in parentheses, there is that promise, the promise of return. While awaiting the return, we tell stories, 168 Notes create literature, recite poetry, remember the past and experience the pre- sent. Basically, we writers are telling the story of that return—either in the form of a New Testament or an Old Testament variation on the creation myth. It’s a return to innocence, to childhood, to our sources.”Qtd. in William Gass,“The Philosophical Significance of Exile” (interview with Nuruddin Farah, Han Vladislav,and Jorge Edwards) in Literature in Exile, ed. John Glad (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 4. Like many comments by male writers regarding the effects of exile on their writing, Farah’s observation omits mention of the female dimension: Eve’s expulsion, with Adam, from Paradise. For feminist postcolonial approaches to the notion of home, see Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge and New York:Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Caren Kaplan, “Territorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 187–98. 5. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) was the foundational text for bookshelves of studies elaborating on and qualifying this conjunction of ideas. Among the most influential studies in feminist critical scholarship is Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s elucidation of the figurative meanings of domestic spaces, The Madwoman in the Attic. Focusing on nineteenth-century British women writers, Gilbert and Gubar’s groundbreaking study inaugu- rated a central premise in feminist literary criticism: that literary narratives might be more fully understood through the intersecting contexts not only of culture and history but of gender and patriarchal ideology.Figurations— and configurations—of space derive their power as metaphors from social arrangements and imbedded ideological assumptions about differences in gender. See The Madwoman in the Attic:The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Annette Kolodny’s work also pivots on spatial conceptualizations of women’s writing. See The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in Amer- ican Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). 6. Roberta Rubenstein, Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). 7. See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Motherhood: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); and Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Develop- ment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 8. In Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities, Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy coin the term “daughter-centricity” to highlight the one-sided emphasis in second wave feminist theory and criticism on the daughter’s subjectivity at the expense of the mother’s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 2. Marianne Hirsch provides a needed balance by analyzing the mother as subject rather than object in fiction by women. See Notes 169 The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 9. As psychoanalyst Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco phrases it in his exploration of the meaning of nostalgia, homesickness may be “resolved or alleviated by a return home or even simply by the promise of such a return, but no such ready solution is effective for the nostalgic’s plight, inasmuch as what he yearns for belongs to another time.” “Reminiscence and Nostalgia: The Pleasure and Pain of Remembering,” in The Course of Life: Psychoanalytic Contributions Toward Understanding Personality Development. Vol. III: Adulthood and the Aging Process, ed. Stanley I. Greenspan and George H. Pollock (Wash- ington, DC: DHHS Pub. No. (ADM) 81–1000), 120. 10. The word nostalgia was coined by Johannes Hofer in 1688, combining the Greek nostos, return or the return home, with algos, pain or sorrow. See Mario Jacoby, Longing for Paradise: Psychological Perspectives on an Archetype, trans. Myron B. Gubitz (Boston: Sigo Press, 1985), 5. In pre-twentieth cen- tury Europe, when doctors were still ignorant of infectious agents as the source of disease, they regarded nostalgia as the source of organic diseases as diverse as gastroenteritis and pleurisy. See Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 54 (1966): 81–103. In other words, according to David Lowenthal,“To leave home for long was to risk death.” The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 10. The idea that a person’s separation from home could produce an organic disease named “nostalgia” gave way in the twentieth century to its construction as an emo- tional disturbance related not to the workings of the body but to “the workings of memory” (Starobinski, 89–90) and characterized less by the risk of literal death than by a yearning for something of emotional signifi- cance that an individual regards as absent or lost. 11. Starobinski (paraphrasing Kant), 191. 12. Beverley Raphael describes mourning as the process through which an individual “gradually undoes the psychological bonds that bound him to the deceased.” The Anatomy of Bereavement (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 33. Psychoanalyst George H. Pollock conceptualizes the idea of mourning more broadly, proposing that what he terms the “mourning-liberation process” is a universal, lifelong series of adaptations to significant losses and changes, from which no individual is immune. The process may produce different outcomes, ranging from normal resolution (liberation) to arrested mourning or depressive disorders. The acute experiences of grief and bereavement precipitated by the death of a significant love object are a sub- set of this lifelong developmental process of mourning and reconciliation. The Mourning-Liberation Process, 2 vols. (Madison, CT: International Univer- sities Press, 1989), vol. 1, 105. 13. Marsha H. Levy-Warren observes that “a move from one’s culture of origin can be seen as similar to the loss of a loved person, which initiates a process 170 Notes of mourning.” “Moving to a New Culture: Cultural Identity, Loss, and Mourning,” in The Psychology of Separation and Loss: Perspectives on Develop- ment, Life Transitions, and Clinical Practice, ed. Jonathan Bloom-Feshbach,Sally Bloom-Feshbach, et al. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), 305. 14. A number of feminist scholars have explored the idea of nostalgia from lit- erary and psychoanalytic perspectives. For example, Donna Bassin regards nostalgia in psychoanalytic terms as a fantasy “devoid of a sense of internal agency” and thus one in which an individual “remains trapped in a process of endless seeking.”See Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey,and Maryle Mahrer Kaplan, eds., Representations of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 168. According to Mary Jacobus, nostalgia for the “lost mother” of childhood occurs despite the fact that “there never was a prior time, or an unmediated relation for the subject (whether masculine or fem- inine), except as the oedipal defined it retroactively. The mother is already structured as division by the oedipal; no violent separation can be envisaged without an aura of pathos, because separation is inscribed from the start. .” First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psycho- analysis (New York: Routledge, 1995), 18. Gayle Greene, in her analysis of feminist uses of memory in women’s fiction, distinguishes between nostal- gia and what she judges “more productive forms of memory”: “nostalgia and remembering are in some sense antithetical, since nostalgia is a forget- ting, merely regressive, whereas
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