Mirrors, Marriage, and Nostalgia: Mother-Daughter Relations in Writings by Isabelle de Charriere and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun

Abstract

This article explains how Isabelle de Charriere and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun take up where seventeenth-century writers Madame de Lafayette and Madame de Sevigne left off in portraying an intense narcissistic relationship between mother and daughter in which the daughter’s heterosexual desire threatens the primary dyad by defining the daughter as separate from her mother. Moreover, pressing beyond these specific French women writers of an earlier age, the essay argues that the mother’s nostalgia for reflective unity with her daughter is not different in kind from the daughter’s nostalgia in the twentieth century. Feminists’ longing for the preoedipal mother is based on the same fantasy of past reflective unity as the early modem mothers’ longing for their heterosexually undetermined daughters. The essay concludes by urging the importance not only of producing alternative models and metaphors for coexistent maternal and filial subjectivities, but of demanding cultural recognition for alternative models to rival and, if possible, supersede early modem, Freudian, and post-Freudian elegiac and nostalgic models alike.