Violence, Silence and Storytelling: The Dilemma of Matricide in Women’s Memoirs

Abstract

In this paper I explore how women’s thinking subjectivity is structured by a need to negotiate between identifying with and repudiating our mothers. Oriented by Melanie Klein’s theory of matricide which posits that an infant’s capacity to think for herself originates in her need to separate from her mother, I consider the implications of this structure for women’s gendered experiences of intellectualism. To examine how this dilemma of matricide animates women’s thinking lives I read Helen M. Buss’s criticism of Carolyn Kay Steedman’s memoir Landscape for a Good Woman. I argue that Buss’s criticism of Steedman is symptomatic of her ambivalent relation to the problem of identification and repudiation that drives her own intellectual labour. I then turn to a scene in Buss’s memoir, Memoirs from Away, to examine how the matricidal dilemma resonates through her work of reading other women’s memoirs and of writing her own.

Keywords:

• matricide
• academic women
• memoir
• Helen M. Buss
• Carolyn Kay Steedman

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my colleagues in the Faculty of Education at York University, Toronto, for their comments on this manuscript during its various stages. Special thanks to Dr. Jen Gilbert and Dr. Alice Pitt for their careful and generous readings of this work. And finally, thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its assistance.

Notes

1. Of course neither Pitt nor I can help but be implicated in this trap as well. This is the dilemma at the heart of matricide as a condition of women’s symbolic work of writing; in our work as women carving out a cultural space for ourselves within the academy and the genre of life writing, we always risk objectifying and destroying the labour of the women who came before us. As critic, Pitt must subject Buss to the kind of destruction to which she notices Buss subjects Steedman.

2. Importantly, women are not located outside of patriarchy, but rather necessarily live, and are implicated, within it. And indeed, while patriarchy tends to benefit men as a group at the expense of women as a group, some women nevertheless derive certain privileges from the on-going state of patriarchy.

3. To delineate my discussion of Buss as a theorist/author from Buss as a character in her own story, I generally use her surname to refer to her former capacity, and her first name (Helen) to refer to her latter.

4. For their discussion of ‘emotional significance’, see Pitt and Brushwood Rose (2007).