In search of a female identity: the suppressed mother in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September

Claudia Cao

2017-01-01

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Abstract

The Last September (1929) is a novel particularly significant in Bowen’s reflection on the definition of the female identity and on the role of the relationship with other women in determining a woman’s possibilities for self-determination. Starting from Marianne Hirsch’s analysis of mother-daughter plots, this contribution aims to illustrate the reasons for which the initial destabilizing role of the protagonist Lois against the conservatism of the family transforms, in the end, into passivity and subordination. This passage, following both Hirsch and Irigaray’s thought, is due to two factors: the removal of the protagonist’s origins, especially those relating to her mother, and the impossibility of a female genealogy for her surrogate mother and other women belonging to a patriarchal value system.