Daughters Who Remember. The Omnipresent Mother in Sarraute’s Enfance and the Absent Mother in Modiano’s La Petite Bijou

Abstract

Pairing the novel of Enfance by Nathalie Sarraute with La Petite Bijou by Patrick Modiano lends a new perspective to the struggle of the female protagonist in both texts. Where the dominant critical view of both novels separately has presented the daughter as achieving a positive resolution to her struggle at the end of the text, deeper affinities between the narratives reveal a common denominator that debunks this perspective. Rereading the novels from the psychological framework of family systems theory, I suggest that the daughter wades unsuccessfully through issues of attachment and differentiation from her mother. In the two contrasting cases of Enfance, where attachment is too intense, and La Petite Bijoux, where it is too feeble, the daughter is caught in the same persistent cycle of struggle and failure to gain autonomy, thereby demonstrating that a resolution that other critics want to see is equally impossible.