Death and the mother from Dickens to Freud : Victorian fiction and the anxiety of origins / Carolyn Dever.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dever, Carolyn, author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 17.

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 17

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Mothers in literature.

Psychoanalysis and literature--Great Britain.

Psychoanalysis and literature.

Literature and society--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Literature and society.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Women and literature.

Psychological fiction, English--History and criticism.

Psychological fiction, English.

Maternal deprivation in literature.

Motherhood in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Death in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xv, 233 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Other Title:

Death & the Mother from Dickens to Freud

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The cultural ideal of motherhood in Victorian Britain seems to be undermined by Victorian novels, which almost always represent mothers as incapacitated, abandoning or dead. Carolyn Dever argues that the phenomenon of the dead or missing mother in Victorian narrative is central to the construction of the good mother as a cultural ideal. Maternal loss is the prerequisite for Victorian representations of domestic life, a fact which has especially complex implications for women. When Freud constructs psychoanalytical models of family, gender and desire, he too assumes that domesticity begins with the death of the mother. Analysing texts by Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Darwin and Woolf, as well as Freud, Klein and Winnicott, Dever argues that fictional and theoretical narratives alike use maternal absence to articulate concerns about gender and representation. Psychoanalysis has long been used to analyse Victorian fiction; Dever contends that Victorian fiction has much to teach us about psychoanalysis.

Contents:

The lady vanishes

Psychoanalytic cannibalism

Broken mirror, broken wor-s: Bleak house

Wilkie Collins and the secret of the mother's plot

Denial, displacement, Deronda

Calling Dr. Darwin

Virginia Woolf's "Victorian novel."

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-229) and index.

ISBN:

0-511-58530-6

0-511-00361-7