Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter Dilemma in French Women’s Writings, 1671–1928 (review)

Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter Dilemma in French Women’s Writings, 1671–1928 starts with a simple, yet significant premise: we need to look at mother-daughter relationships in French fiction from a new perspective. Instead of relying on traditional psychoanalytic theories about mother-daughter relations such as those written by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Nancy Chodorow, or Julia Kristeva, Katharine Ann Jensen focuses on the intersubjective theories developed by critic Jessica Benjamin, where mother and daughter are interactive subjects.

The long introduction of nearly seventy pages explains Jensen’s new critical method and then explores, through case studies, the phenomenon of “mother-daughter reflectivity” as it has existed in various forms (p. 25). The case studies include texts by two male writers, François de Grenaille (L’Honnête fille, 1640) and Joseph Reyre (L’Ecole des demoiselles, 1786), and one by Thérèse de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert (Avis d’une mere à sa fille, 1730).

The following five chapters of the book contain the central analysis of Uneasy Possessions; each one addresses a well-known woman and one of her major texts that centers primarily on mother-daughter relations. These authors include three women of the aristocracy who experienced motherhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Madame de Lafayette’s fictional mother-daughter relationship in La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Madame de Sévigné’s published letters to her daughter, and Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun’s memoirs, titled Souvenirs (1835–37), about both her career as a woman artist in the eighteenth century and her relationship with her daughter. The fourth and fifth chapters examine famous women writers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, George Sand and Colette, and their positions as rebellious daughters. Although these five women writers come from different times and social classes, Jensen argues persuasively that the cultural contexts for “virtuous femininity,” one of the founding ideas that perpetuated mother-daughter reflectivity and intersubjective mother-daughter relationships, would continue almost unchanged throughout the four centuries being discussed.

Jensen’s new approach examines the ways in which mothers in French literature have been “dynamic agents in their own self-creation as subjects,” something that traditional psychoanalytic approaches could not imagine, since in those theories, the mother was merely the object that the child would have to repudiate in order to move beyond a supposed pre-oedipal phase and to become an independent individual (p. 22). Jensen also focuses on the ways in which mothers objectified their daughters, often in response to social dictates that required that mothers raise their daughters to behave as they did. Although society encouraged women to understand their daughters as their possessions, some of the women studied were motivated by personal goals as well; for example, Jensen’s chapter on Madame de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter indicates that Sévigné also wrote out of narcissistic desires and ambitions to fame.

Jensen’s method also proves effectively that the emotional possession that has so frequently been labeled “love” is often a thinly disguised form of domination and narcissistic control, both between men and women and between mothers and daughters. While the entire book deals with this issue, the chapter on Vigée Lebrun and her relationship to her daughter Julie (“Brunette”) has one of the strongest examinations of this aspect of Jensen’s theory.

What is remarkable about this study is that it does not eliminate the important focus on the daughter’s resistance, which has long been a strong element of mother-daughter analyses; what is new here is that we can understand the daughter’s rebellion as part of a larger power struggle between the two figures. Jensen’s emphasis also reveals that a daughter’s idealization of her mother, along with self-disparaging statements, may actually hide the daughter’s decision to oppose her mother’s will and possessiveness rather than...