Of No One Born: Queering Motherhood in Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne

Abstract

Abstract This article proposes that, rather than a sentimental love story, Pierre de Marivaux’s unfinished novel, La Vie de Marianne ou les aventures de Mme la Comtesse de *** (1731–41), presents a form of queer motherhood that provides a counterpoint to the form of Republican motherhood and the ‘cult of domesticity’ championed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among others) and critiqued by feminists such as Adrienne Rich and Élisabeth Badinter. Grounding the maternal experience in discourses of traumatic memory, it argues that, contrary to Sigmund Freud’s assertion that repeating is an act of repression (rather than working through), in this novel we see the opposite. The article demonstrates how trauma brings women together into polymaternal communities based on mutual affection that bypass the patriarchal structure that tends to shape eighteenth-century sentimental novels. For Marianne, re-enacting childhood trauma with others allows her to share the burden of pain and strengthen intimate bonds between women. More than being just a unique literary experiment, the queer articulation of family throughout this novel might help us to imagine an ontology of motherhood that is unencumbered by patriarchy.