Narratives of maternal loss in contemporary women’s writing

A theme common to contemporary women’s writing is the loss of a child and the effects of this on the mother and her family. This preoccupation with the representation of maternal bereavement seems to obtain across generic boundaries within women’s writing as a whole. For example, recent narratives of maternal loss have taken the form of the domestic melodrama (Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter); the gothic novel (Julie Myerson, The Story of You); and the crime thriller (Myerson, Something Might Happen). While some of them represent the loss of a child from the perspective of different family members (Edwards), or from the child’s own perspective in the case of Alice Sebold’s innovative novel The Lovely Bones, this paper focuses on the mother’s perspective, taking Myerson’s two novels as a case study. Something Might Happen (Vintage, 2004) explores various stages of grief and mourning, from initial shock and denial to guilt, anger, numbness and indifference, and rejection of the life the family have lived. Following the conventions of both the crime thriller and domestic melodrama, the resolution of the novel delivers another sudden and tragic death, this time of the protagonist’s daughter, in a manner that appears to punish the heroine for her ‘infidelity’. The ending reinforces the idea that the death of a child is the ultimate form of suffering and negation of meaning. Myerson’s follow up, The Story of You (Vintage, 2007), similarly focuses on a woman’s grief at the death of a loved one. In this case, Rosy has lost a child in a careless accident and her partner takes her to Paris to get over the loss. Here, she receives a note from an old-flame and begins a relationship that the reader isn’t sure is real or imagined. The novel draws on the gothic motif of haunting in order to make an imaginative study of maternal melancholy. This paper utilises Sigmund Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) to analyse the novels’ representation of maternal loss, grief and mourning. It argues that while the Freudian scenario seems relatively clear cut, allowing the mourner to grieve successfully and ‘move on’, these female narratives of maternal loss are much more ambiguous; their endings are occluded and ambivalent rather than straight-forward. It seems that these examples of contemporary women’s writing belie Freud’s straightforward model of mourning and resist the consolatory paradigm of elegy. They show that emotional ties persist even in the ‘acceptance’ of loss and the formation of new ties. Moreover, the self is not fully restored, suggesting that consoling substitution is not the main aim of the texts, which is rather to explore the complexities and unresolvedness of grieving, loss and desire