Cecilia Gil: Producing doubles, creating monsters...
School of Modern Languages Research Seminar Series 2010/11
Location: Old Library Building, Research Beehive, room 2.20
Time/Date: 7th October 2010, 16:00 - 17:00
... Visions of the contemporary mother-daughter relationship in Louise L. Lambrichs's A ton image
The paper will analyse the new conception of the mother-daughter relationship focusing on the recent emergence of monstrous protagonists, as depicted in contemporary French women’s writing. The 1990s generation of women authors investigates, amongst others, the themes of the body, motherhood and identity. Louise L. Lambrichs’s A ton image (1998) offers several representations of monstrous bodies born from the fixed expectations of contemporary society and its inability to accommodate for difference. I will focus on one instance of monstrosity, the clone named France, and show that she is the defective product of a reproduction gone wrong and eventually becomes the inevitable victim of her condition. France’s inability to serve the purposes for which she was created entails her eventual rejection and disposal by her entourage. Dwelling on Kristeva’s theories of abjection (Kristeva: 1980) I demonstrate that these monstrous shapes embody destruction. Their unnatural origin, hybridity and difference make them non-viable and unable to fit to society’s standards, ultimately condemning them to (self-) annihilation. I analyse the contemporary re-evaluation of the concept of reproduction in the context of recent advances in the field of cloning and medically-assisted reproductive technology, in association with notions of identity and difference, and the creation of monstrous (textual) protagonists. Kristeva’s theories on the mother-daughter relationship (Kristeva: 1987) and Jane Gallop’s theorisation of the source of monstrosity in the failed separation between the mother and the daughter (Gallop: 1989) enable me to postulate the notion that the imposition of social standards upon characters, and their recourse to scientific solutions, only produce other hybrid entities rejected as flawed and marginalised creations.
Published: 24th September 2010