Melancholic mothering: mothers, daughters and family violence

Abstract

Through selected theories of melancholia, this paper seeks to shed some fresh interpretive light on the reproduction and disruption of gender, violence and family turmoil across generations of mothers and daughters. The originality of the paper lies in its exploratory deployment of theories of melancholia to consider issues of women, violence and generation. It addresses these matters through a discussion of the intergenerational emotional archives accumulated by two mother–daughter pairs in relation to their different experiences of sexual and other violence. It shares the mothers’ experiences of violence in their childhood and shows how these help to shape the ways in which they raise their daughters and address the troubles that their daughters experience. Different theories of melancholia assist us to explain the dissimilar emotional dynamics between these mother and daughter pairs. But equally their stories suggest the analytical potential of different theories of melancholia for understanding women’s and girls’ diverse responses to violence. Freud’s, Irigaray’s and Silverman’s constructions of melancholia, which are to some extent based on notions of emptiness, lack and insufficiency, are deployed alongside Eng and Kazanjian’s interpretation of a melancholic state of being which focuses on the creative potential of animating the remains of loss; an interpretation that invokes an agential relationship to the losses that violence provokes. The former help to explain what Eng and Kazanjian might see as the ‘hopeless politics’ associated with certain melancholic responses to violence and the latter help to explain what they might consider more ‘hopeful politics’ associated with responses that mobilise a more agential relationship to loss. Although not subscribing to such a stark binary interpretation, we nonetheless argue for an analysis that acknowledges the different ways that the remains of loss are animated. The paper arises from a wider cross‐generational study in Australia of the lives of educationally, economically and culturally marginalised young women and their mothers.

Keywords:

• gender
• violence
• mother–daughter relationships
• melancholia
• loss
• agency

Notes

1. This paper arises from the Australian Research Council Discovery grant (2002–4) ‘Young women negotiating from the margins of education and work: towards gender justice in educational and youth policies and programs’ awarded to Jane Kenway and Alison Mackinnon (Monash University and University of South Australia) and Julie McLeod and Andrea Allard (Melbourne University and Deakin University). We express our appreciation to Danni Nicholas Sexton, Candice Oster and Elizabeth Bullen who also worked on the project in South Australia and thank Elizabeth Bullen for her preliminary work on the narratives used in this paper. Thanks to Julie, Alison and Mary Lou Rasmussen for their helpful comments on this paper. Thanks also to three anonymous reviewers who offered such generously constructive comments. While in the end we could not address them all, we are taking them forward in future work (e.g. Kenway 2008).

2. We note however that Restuccia (2000) does use Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia and Foucault’s theorising of power relations to discuss domestic abuse. However, her hypothesis is based on the notion that both mourning and melancholia make a woman susceptible to abuse.

3. Cross‐generational abuse and parenting have also been analysed via attachment theory, which points to the difficulties parents who have been abused in childhood experience in their own parenting.

4. A more comprehensive body of research on various aspects of motherhood has informed our wider study but we do not have the space to engage this here.

5. For further discussion on this matter with regard to our study but not with regard to gender and violence see McLeod and Wright (in press).

6. Melancholia is central to the development of Butler’s theories and is explicated in Butler (1997).

7. Irigaray’s critique also includes Lacan’s claims that the female subject is constrained by a double lack – not only of the penis, but also of the phallus as the primary signifier of lack in the symbolic field.

8. In some such instances concepts such as ‘melancholia’ are seen as unredeemable in feminist terms due specifically to the links made between lack and the feminine and more broadly the links to traditional gendered inscriptions and relations. See, for example, Benjamin (1990), Dimen and Harris (2001) and Dimen and Goldner (2002).

9. We acknowledge that Irigaray evokes a more transgressive account of femininity that we will not pursue here. For her, the ‘nothingness’ of the female sex is replaced by ‘closeness’: this other way of being in ‘proximity’ is represented literally by the physical contact of the lips of a woman’s sex and metaphorically by her ability to discursively ‘touch upon’ meaning (for a useful discussion see Braidotti 1994).