Narrating the Final Loss: Scenes from the Maternal Deathbed in Gabrielle Roy's Le temps qui m'a manqué and Francine Noël's La femme de ma vie

Abstract

Narrating the Final Loss:Scenes from the Maternal Deathbed in Gabrielle Roy's Le temps qui m'a manqué and Francine Noël's La femme de ma vie Julie Rodgers AS ADALGISA GIORGIO REMARKS in her introduction to Writing Mothers and Daughters, "the mother-daughter dyad is still the dominant structuring principle of female identity in Western cultures."1 Prominent feminist theorists such as Nancy Chodorow and Adrienne Rich have illustrated in great detail the impact of this unique female-to-female relationship on the daughter's psychological and sexual development and, moreover, her own relationship to motherhood.2 It is generally agreed, however, that far from being an unproblematic cathexis, the mother-daughter bond is wrenchingly complex, so much so that Phyllis Chesler has labeled it "woman's stormiest love affair."3 In the field of literary studies, proponents of écriture féminine such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous view maternal symbiosis as a core feature of the daughter's text.4 Indeed, so pervasive is the presence of the mother in the daughter's narrative that Marianne Hirsch has identified a distinct genre of matrilineal literature, namely "the mother-daughter plot,"5 in which the daughter, via writing, is always thinking back through the mother in some respect. Lori Saint-Martin develops this concept further, arguing that the relationship between mother and daughter must be viewed as a powerful dynamic "qui se trouve à la source même de l'écriture au féminin et qui surdétermine les structures narratives et même, dans une certaine mesure, le langage."6 For scholars of matrilineal literature, the daughter's text emerges as an important space for maternal reconciliation in the aftermath of a rupture from the mother.7 Unsurprisingly, then, a large body of mother-daughter writing is posthumous in nature (occurring after the mother's death) and characterized by a need, on the part of the daughter, to return to the mother and atone for previous conflicts. Indeed, according to Annick Houel, one could even argue that the mother's death is a necessary condition for reparative mother-daughter writing. In her essay on the death of the mother in women's writing in French, Houel observes that "les filles ne peuvent pas dire leur amour pour la mère que celle-ci une fois morte."8 In this respect, the maternal deathbed emerges as a pivotal incident in the daughterly text, serving both as a site of relational [End Page 40] renegotiation as well as a highly condensed metaphor for the fundamental mother-daughter anxieties. Judith Kegan Gardiner unpacks the rich symbolism of the maternal deathbed scene in women's writing, arguing that the dying mother often represents the oppressive aspects of institutional motherhood and 'traditional' womanhood that the daughter, quite literally, wishes to bury. Moreover, Kegan Gardiner highlights the mother's passing as a threshold moment that allows mother and daughter, perhaps for the first time "at least fleetingly to feel themselves […] as interdependent yet separate identities."9 It is widely agreed among grief scholars that, due to the unique and often intense nature of the mother-daughter bond, the death of the mother gives rise to a markedly distinct form of bereavement on the part of the daughter. For Moss et al., the daughter's grief for the mother remains largely transitional instead of ever reaching a point of resolution, with the emphasis on the need to maintain a continuing bond with the deceased mother.10 Similarly, Martha Robbins, in her study of bereaved daughters, argues that, in terms of the daughter's experience of grief, the actual physical death of the mother is eclipsed by a deeper sense of loss, that of the mother-daughter relationship itself.11 This loss, in turn, leads to an ongoing process of bereavement whereby the daughter becomes fixated on reconstructing the mother. Hope Edelman supports this view in her study of motherless daughters, arguing that, when a mother dies, a daughter's mourning never completely ends. The daughter's longing for the mother, she writes, never dissipates but, rather, "hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any...