Informed by feminist interpretations of birth and maternity, this thesis offers a re-reading and scholarly reappraisal of Anaϊs Nin's recently published diaries, supplemented by other evidence from her fiction. Maternity offers a site of ambivalence that has always been problematic to feminists. It became particularly unfashionable during the second wave of feminism, due to the female biological potential being exploited as a reason to subjugate women and limit their participation in non-domestic spheres. However, as Luce Irigaray considers sexual difference "one of the major philosophical issues in our time" maternity is an unavoidable example of sexual difference that requires exploration and re-consideration. The cultural coding of maternity is a live political issue and therefore worthy of close philosophical scrutiny. This issue is particularly relevant to a critical reappraisal of the work of Anaϊs Nin, who can offer interesting and provocative contributions to the discussion. Within a literary context, accounts of motherhood from the perspective of the mother are less than typical, yet this is the space within which a diverse maternal imaginary might be represented as fundamental, rather than marginal. In what Luce Irigaray refers to as the phallogocentric order, the Western literary, and in turn, philosophical, psychoanalytical, linguistic, and cultural tradition has only one history, built on the paradigmatic father-son relationship, or Oedipal drama, and necessitating symbolic and psychic matricide. As Alison Stone writes, "in the West, the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body." This is a cultural model of production that would seek to eclipse the mother's experience of reproduction. It is not a model that is born from the original relationship to the maternal, nor does it allow for the contribution of the mother's or the daughter's voice. Laura Green outlines the importance of Irigaray's discussion of cultural matricide in order to argue "for the importance of constructing a non-matricidal account of female subjectivity." If the father and son are dominant figures of a literary narrative under which we understand ourselves, what is lost, excluded, or silenced has implications for the way that things are now. What is required is a literary and philosophical tradition based on the mother's continuation and a feminine genealogy. Who are the mothers of the literary canon, and who or what may be considered their offspring? This thesis finds that Anaϊs Nin is a problematic but significant literary mother who developed an alternative subjective model for maternity, not only in the birth of creative accomplishments but also through creating a space for identity formation and intersubjective relationships forged in relation to the feminine. This analysis uses three stages of pregnancy: the womb as conception, the umbilical in gestation, and birth to structure an analysis of Nin's maternal discourse and embodiment that chronologically maps her development and articulation of a new kind of motherhood. Sadly, the contributions that mothers make to their daughters' maternal memories, and in turn, their own experiences of motherhood, are not always positively acknowledged or acknowledged at all. Those who deem Nin's work significant usually attribute her creative remaking of identity to a recovery from paternal trauma or to her intellectual and romantic relationships with psychoanalysts such as Otto Rank or artists such as Henry Miller. However, Nin's model is based on her inherited understanding of maternity from her mother, Rosa Culmell, combined with experiments in cultural, maternal, bodily, and symbolic imaginary that allowed Nin to reconceptualise the maternal body in relationship to another. Nin's innovative act of self-birth and reconceptualising of motherhood is heavily influenced by an ambivalent, yet creative relationship to her own maternal past. Nin asserted the need for women to transform themselves and society in order to achieve liberation, but she knew that "to become man or like man is no solution." Nin believed that the power women could utilise in their relationship with others would also be made up of individual expressions of the personal rather than a single, collective voice or movement. Nin's works, especially her diaries, have expressed this different maternal discourse as a model instigated from her own experience of maternity as a way of exploring self-birth, subjectivity, creativity, and encounters between two sexed subjects. This allowed Nin to express her own experience of maternity as it diverged from typical institutional or socio-historic representations. Her self-mythologising through the diaries was a significant feminist practice which, I will argue, has allowed her to establish her own work as her offspring and a significant literary heritage. ACCESS RESTRICTED TO ABSTRACT ONLY UNTIL 28/02/2021
| Date of Award | 2015 |
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| Original language | English |
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