Abstract
Women writers have a penchant for burning down paternal houses that do not offer their female protagonists satisfactory homes.1 In Daughters of the House, Michèle Roberts prefers to transform rather than destroy the house in which her two main female characters reside, a metaphor for the patriarchal symbolic order,2 and she attempts this through an exploration of the conditions Julia Kristeva calls abjection and estrangement. Roger Luckhurst's recent reading of Daughters of the House points to the usefulness of psychoanalytic insights in reading Roberts's text. His essay, like mine, focuses on the relationship between memory and history; but whereas Luckhurst uses theories of mourning and melancholia to discuss repressed histories, I want to use Kristeva's theories of abjection and estrangement to explore the relationship between women and history and between femininity and repression from a woman-centered perspective.
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