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Jensen, Katharine Ann, Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter Dilemma in French Women's Writing, 1671-1928. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011. 450 pp. $90 (cloth or ebook).
The story of mother-daughter relations is central to any postmodern understanding of both the history of being female and the current socio-psychic situation of women, either as daughters of mothers or as mothers of daughters. Following in the tradition of feminist literary critics such as Marianne Hirsch and E. Ann Kaplan, Katherine Ann Jensen offers readers an intriguing analysis of mother-daughter relations in both French literature and history that spans four centuries. While earlier studies of the mother-daughter relationship in literature have relied most often on psychoanalytic theories of mother-child differentiation following the preoedipal stage as described by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, Jensen bases her analysis on Jessica Benjamin's theory of intersubjectivity, allowing for a more nuanced view of the maternal figure than that supported by the post-Freudian scenario of the blissful mother-child dyad separated by the phallic presence of the Father. By applying Benjamin's ideas to the works of five female French writers (Madame de Lafayette, Madame de Sévigné, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, George Sand and Colette), Jensen makes a compelling case for the centrality of maternal narcissism over four centuries and the elements of Hegelian domination and submission in the model of motherdaughter reflectivity.
In her thorough and extensive introduction, Jensen elucidates Benjamin's psychoanalytic theory of intersubjective relations and illustrates how this theory can be useful in understanding mother-daughter dynamics in particular. She then presents a detailed examination of three French...