Between Amniotic and Semiotic: The Kristevan Maternal Body in Contemporary British Women’s Fiction

Abstract

From her seminal study Powers of Horror (1980) to her more recent conceptualization of maternal reliance (2014), the attendant ambivalence of motherhood has been both a recurring theme in Julia Kristeva’s writing, as well as her dominant method to demonstrate the affinities between bodily transformation and psychic development. At the same time, the post-war literary narration of motherhood’s “impossible choices”, as one critic has written (Harnett 2019), has left scattered but memorable marks on the contemporary British literary canon. Experimental as well as established British women writers have attempted to document the affective ebb and flow of the maternal body as well as motherhood itself both as an individual experience and as a cultural and socioeconomic institution (Staub 2007). This essay examines such literary works from a Kristevan perspective, attempting a literary tracing of the herethics of maternal love (Kristeva 2014) in selected British women authors who have heret(h)ically imagined and articulated maternal ambivalence in the interwar and contemporary era. Employing the post-realist fiction of Olive Moore (1939), Doris Lessing (1988), and Jessie Greengrass (2018) as a springboard for a Kristevan analysis of maternal bodies, it is argued that the conceptualization of a herethics of maternal love finds its literary counterpart in a continuous tradition of women’s exploration of the ambivalent mother through an experimental narrative style, which in turn mirrors the construction of a new maternal body.