120002 SE Literature Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2019S)

“We were ‘occasions of sin’ rather than perpetrators; we incited others rather than committed acts ourselves. Could it be that the female sex was intrinsically passive and docile, so nicer?” (Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, xiii).

In her memoir Why Be Happy If You Could Be Normal? (2011) Jeanette Winterson tells the story of her abusive adoptive mother, a “flamboyant depressive” (1) and evangelical Christian who, routinely would lock her out of the house, forbid reading, burn her favorite books, deprive her of food and beat her up. Her adoptive father is described as a quiet, self-effacing and subservient man who lives in the thrall of his narcissistic and controlling wife. As the history of English literature from Beowulf via Shakespeare up to D.H. Lawrence shows us, mothers have had the underestimated power to mortify not only their daughters but their sons as well – one only needs to think of Hamlet, of Coriolanus, or of Paul in Sons and Lovers, to name but a few. Within hetero-normative discourses of ‘femininity’ and ‘womanhood’, there has not been much space for theorizations of ‘female’ perpetrators or of violent mothers. The aim of this course is to re-open the dialogue between psychoanalysis and gender/queer studies and to investigate representations of what Jacques Lacan in his Seminar XVII has called the ‘crocodile mother’ – a powerful, sadistic and cannibalistic mother capable of doing precisely what Mrs Winterson did to her daughter. The aim is to analyze different forms and different degrees of ‘mortification’ in a range of fictional and autobiographical texts. The course will address the difficulty of theorizing the deployment of hyper-masculine oppression by non-docile women characters, and the urgency to confront this long neglected ‘mortiferous’ legacy in its wider cultural, aesthetic and socio-political implications.