| This autocritical study explores memoir as a form of self-making in Jane Lazarre's The Mother Knot, Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness and Wet Earth and Dreams, Elizabeth Ehrlich's Miriam's Kitchen and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Through the lens of Julia Kristeva's theories of representation in the Symbolic order, principally abjection, as well as rejection which insures the interaction of the semiotic and symbolic elements in producing representations, the analysis shows these contemporary North American women/daughters using memoir practices to shape identity in relation to the unspeakable forces associated with the maternal. Drawing out these forces in the form of contradictory subject positions leads to a process of "divining self," a continual oscillation and fluidity of identity demonstrated by close readings of the texts and examples drawn from my own memoir. |
