Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and ChodorowAlison StoneGod the Father and Jesus the Son; Abraham and Isaac; Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus; Zeus and Dionysus; Hamlet and his father; Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons—representations of and fantasies about father-son relationships are central to Western culture and philosophy. Within philosophy, one thinks of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic in terms of the divine trinity, Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Christ and Dionysus, or Kierkegaard’s meditations on Abraham’s near-murder of Isaac. In contrast, mother-daughter relationships have been shrouded in near-universal silence—much more so than representations of either mothers and sons (Oedipus and Jocasta; Mary and Jesus) or fathers and daughters (Agamemnon and Iphigenia; Lear and Cordelia). Female and feminist theorists, writers, and artists have done much to bring mother-daughter relationships into representation and to reimagine the maternal beyond its traditional subservience to father-son dynasties.Amongst continental feminists, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have, of course, made major contributions to this task. Within Anglophone feminism, too, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have sought to rectify Freud’s overemphasis on the paternal and on father-son relations. Nancy Chodorow’s important work in this area paints a portrait of contemporary mother-daughter relations which seems, at first sight, strikingly similar to Irigaray’s. Both thinkers suggest that mothers and their infant daughters experience a unique level of mutual identification. But under patriarchy—specifically, given exclusively female childrearing for Chodorow and given the absence of any symbolization of female subjectivity for Irigaray—daughters are forced to turn to the father [End Page 45] to achieve any psychical independence from their mothers. The independence that daughters thus attain coexists with ongoing psychical identification with their mothers, so that women oscillate endlessly between separation from and mergence with their mothers. If the dominant template for father-son relations involves violent rivalry followed by guilt-ridden father-worship as the cement of fraternal society, as Freud described in Totem and Taboo (Freud 2001), the template for mother-daughter relations involves hostile separation constantly undone by ongoing fusion. This difference in templates maps the social-symbolic difference between the paternal position of power/authority/law and the maternal position of powerlessness/silence/body.However, the manifest similarities between Irigaray’s and Chodorow’s pictures are embedded in deep theoretical differences. The details of their descriptions of mother-daughter relations differ, and they give different explanations for why these relations follow a logic of separation and fusion: female mothering for Chodorow, the paternal symbolic order for Irigaray. They make different proposals for how to change these relations: shared parenting for Chodorow versus symbolic transformation for Irigaray. They hold conflicting conceptions of the self and of language, reflecting their heterogeneous psychoanalytic backgrounds in Anglo-American object relations versus French Lacanianism and poststructuralism. These deep differences raise questions about whether Chodorow and Irigaray are discussing mother-daughter relations in the same sense at all.Bringing Irigaray and Chodorow together across their different intellectual contexts, this article compares and partially synthesizes their visions of the maternal and of mother-daughter relations. By integrating their perspectives, we can move beyond the “impasse” between Lacanian and object-relations feminisms that dominated psychoanalytic feminist debates in the 1980s and 1990s (Brennan 1991)—debates that have crucially shaped continental feminists’ orientation towards questions of sexual difference, language and representation, and the embodied psyche.The impasse in question has at least two strands. First, for object-relations feminists such as Chodorow, our pre-Oedipal relations with our mothers shape us so that we acquire “core” selves with a fairly stable gender. This approach elevates the mother in importance (compared to classical psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the father), but it loses sight of psychic and gender instability. This can make Chodorow’s views seem rather dated given the impact of Judith Butler’s work and her emphasis on the unstable, shifting nature of gender. Lacanian feminists such as Jacquelyn Rose (Rose 1986) reemphasize psychic instability, but they do so by stressing that the subject is split between paternal language and the pre-Oedipal maternal realm, which means that these theorists also...