Phantasies, Motherhood, and Genealogy

in The Hours

Abstract

       

Virginia Woolf has become a model of foremother in the Modernist literature and her works have also inspired profound influences in the later postmodernist works and various film adaptations. Among Woolf’s works, Mrs. Dalloway offers a visionary interpretation to construct a Kleinian matricentric world to replace Freudian paternal genealogies. Bearing this as a major focus, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours contributes to conceptualize Woolf’s maternal aura into a postmodernist re-interpretation of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway by weaving it as a world of female genealogy in the multicultural cities located from the continent to the Untied States. The essay, thus, presents a comprehensive study of Stephen Daldry’s cinematic version, The Hours, along with David Hare’s same name script as the major contexts to concentrate on Woolf’s rhetoric of m/other with psychoanalytic feminist approaches, namely Melanie Klein’s object-relations and Julia Kristeva’s abject. Contrary to the dominant oedipal focused concepts, the genealogical project of psychological mothering, thus, has shaped an alternative view on mapping the possible world of female phantasies.                

Key Words

phantasies, the paranoid-schizoid position, the depressive position, anxiety-situations, breast, abject.

To:

 

    http://english.nccu.edu.tw/journal/Literature/index.htm

政治大學 tjel@nccu.edu.tw

    Nov, 2007 and Feb 22, 2008

Taiwan Journal of English Literature (台灣英美文學期刊)