THE MATERNAL METAPHOR A STUDY OF THE MOTHER' IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZABETH JOLLEY. by PAMELA BAGWORTH MA, BA, DipEd. This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia Department of English 1993 ABSTRACT THE MATERNAL METAPHOR: A STUDY OF THE MOTHER' IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZABETH JOLLEY. Julia Kristeva's work on maternity suggests the possibility of constructing a maternal metaphor which positions the mother at a pivotal site as a thoroughfare between 'nature' and 'culture' in a process that unsettles patriarchal constructions of subjectivity, representation and meaning. Kristeva describes language as a birthing process, creating a split symbolization on the threshold of symbolic structures and bodily drives. The maternal body functions as a representation of the postmodern construction of the splitting process of signification and the split and fragmentary subject. The split subjectivity that the mother represents interrogates traditional structures of language and society and offers a multiplicity of perspectives and positions for women's writing. Kristeva suggests that the maternal body functions as a threshold, maintaining and yet threatening socio-symbolic structures; as a filter for the repressed maternal or semiotic aspects of language and society; and as a thoroughfare which links the semiotic and symbolic. The maternal metaphor thus offers a linguistic model in which the process of subject formation and literary production are enacted in relation to the mother's body and the maternal metaphor allows for a recognition of the semiotic in language and the maternal in society. The writing of Elizabeth Jolley lends itself to an analysis that uses the maternal metaphor. The mother occupies an interesting, ambivalent position in Jolley's novels The mother figure in her texts often disrupts bodily and social constraints and her marginalized position functions to decentre narrative and linguistic structures. Jolley's writing reveals the social and linguistic conflict of woman as mother: the need to 'write the mother,' to confront the mother, to reclaim repressed maternal elements; but also the need to 'write out the mother,' to establish boundaries between self and mother, yet to acknowledge the porous nature of these boundaries. The maternal metaphor effects a linguistic rupture which breaches the 'master narrative' and positions woman in the maternal thoroughfare, where multiple narratives fold and unfold. This thesis examines Jolley's writing to reveal the often hidden pathways of the maternal thoroughfare, which, through the use of camivalesque narrative techniques, articulate the semiotic in the symbolic, in a process which reclaims the mother through language. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Texts, abbreviations and referencing format ii Chapter 1 : The Maternal Metaphor 1 Chapter 2 : Zero Degree Deviancy: Palomino 27 Chapter 3 : The Mother, Cleaning and Cats 48 Chapter 4 : The Poly logue of Miss Peabody 's Inheritance 66 Chapter 5 : Revolution and Riddles in Poetic Language 85 Chapter 6 : The Melancholia of Milk and Honey 104 Chapter 7: Foxybaby: Stabat Mater 129 Chapter 8: The Powers of Horror: An Essay on The Well 147 Chapter 9 : Motherhood According to Elizabeth Jolley 176 Chapter 10 : 'From One Identity to an Other': From Dispossession to Inheritance ? 199 Chapter 11: Women's Time and Place in Cabin Fever 216 Conclusion : The Maternal Metaphor: Claiming the Jouissance of the Mother 243 Bibliography 250 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Brenda Walker, for her help and encouragement as a friend, mentor and editor. She has been very generous with her time, her scholarly advice and her support. I value what I have learnt under her supervision. I wish to acknowledge the encouragement and friendship I found amongst the English Department staff and postgraduates who provided a supportive intellectual community, which fostered research and inquiry and personal satisfaction. I appreciate the friendly, cooperative support of the English Department general staff, the financial assistance of The University of Western Australia Research Scholarship and travel assistance from the University Research Committee and the English Department. I also want to acknowledge my appreciation of my family's support which has made this thesis, from a theoretical and a practical point of view, both possible and difficult. Much that is discussed in this thesis has been challenging on a personal as well as an academic level. The encouragement and practical assistance from my husband, Gordon has enabled me to maintain myself in the maternal thoroughfare, attempting to bridge the domestic and the academic. TEXTS, ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCING FORMAT This thesis is a study of 'the Mother' in Elizabeth Jolley's works. Originally I wrote on all of Jolley's books, but, because of the length of the thesis, drastic editing was required. A decision was made to confine the study to Jolley's novels, which meant excluding the short stories, with their very interesting cleaning woman figure, and the more personal comments in Central Mischief. Elizabeth Jolley herself further complicated matters by releasing another novel, The Georges' Wife, after this thesis was written. She very generously allowed me to read her manuscript copy but, because of the constraints of length, I have not been able to include a discussion of the novel. My referencing format is based on the MLA Style Manual, 1985 edition, using endnotes, with the exception of Jolley's works which are referenced in the body of the thesis, with the following abbreviations. The list indicates the editions I have used: CF Cabin Fever (Ringwood: Viking-Penguin, 1990) CM Central Mischief, ed. Caroline Lurie (Ringwood: Viking-Penguin, 1992) F Foxybaby (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985) MH Milk and Honey (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984) MPI Miss Peabody's Inheritance (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983) Mr SR Mr. Scobie's Riddle (Ringwood, Penguin, 1983) MFM My Father's Moon (Ringwood: Penguin, 1989) N The Newspaper of Claremont Street (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1981) P Palomino (St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1984) SM The Sugar Mother (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1988) 'SP' 'Self Portrait: A Child Went Forth,' Stories (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984) 299-308. Well The Well (Ringwood: Penguin, 1987) WL Woman in a Lampshade (Ringwood: Penguin, 1983) Chapter 1: The Maternal Metaphor The mother's body has been used as the site of competing discourses, at the intersection of biological and cultural constructions. Traditionally, mothering has been aligned with nature and the body rather than with cultural production, yet childbirth has been appropriated as a metaphor of creativity for male cultural production and maternity has become an objectified icon of that production. Could mothering be refigured? Is it possible to use reproduction as a basis for constituting woman as speaking subject or will it trap her in the traditional discourse on motherhood, spoken for and by patriarchal models? Would different metaphors for motherhood effect changes in women's social situation? Maternity is, potentially, the site for a creative transformation of alternative speaking positions and social and linguistic models of subjectivity and signification. Contemporary critical thought suggests that social meaning and individual consciousness are produced within language, constructed by language, rather than being reflected by language.1 A shift in consciousness and rhetoric, from a belief in an intrinsic nature of being to one which recognizes the contingency of language, suggests the possibility of constructing new models of subjectivity and meaning, which has interesting implications for the social construction of women as reproducers and as cultural producers. In this thesis, I use Julia Kristeva's work on maternity to construct a maternal metaphor which demonstrates how the mother may be represented as a pivotal site, functioning as a thoroughfare between 'nature' and 'culture' in a process that unsettles patriarchal concepts of subjectivity, representation and meaning. Julia Kristeva, in A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,'2 claims that in the contemporary fragmentation of social and linguistic structures woman occupies an unique position as a dissident because, as woman, she is positioned as outside the Law, yet, as mother, she is the means of its continuation. Because pregnancy mediates the biological and social function, it offers a revolutionary basis for a dissident challenge to the paternal control of Law and language. The pregnant body represents the place of splitting, the site of self and other, and the threshold, the means of entry into social structures. Woman thus becomes the pivotal point through which natural and cultural processes are enacted: If pregnancy is a threshold between nature and culture, maternity is a bridge between singularity and ethics. Through the events of her life, a woman thus finds herself at the pivot of sociality - she is at once the guarantee and a threat to its stability.3 Woman as mother is at this threshold, the thoroughfare between semiotic drives and 2 desires of the body and the symbolic encoding of language and culture, and therefore a significant site for constructions of knowledge and being. A linguistic model of pregnancy and maternity may be used to allow women to claim a speaking position and to challenge